ters straightened up, and collections made.'

"I'm glad to hear, sir, that it has helped you so much,' said I. 'The money is yours, of course. Good morning, sir,' and I attempted to pass on.

"But I cannot permit this, Riley,' said he, impulsively; 'you must come over to dinner.'

"I made some lame excuse, but he insisted.

"We shall all expect you,' he said, 'for to tell the truth, Riley, we have been gloomy enough of late, — Fanny particularly. My financial difficulties depressed the whole household. Come to dinner to-morrow.'

“I nodded, having suddenly become a little too much choked up to talk much, and walked away.

"I went there at the appointed time, of course, for Wolfe always had one acceptable thing at his table, and that was good-humor. He was princely at his repasts. At first we felt formal, but it would n't do; we broke down, and presently found our old selves again. She was engaged to Wakefield, and I was too much of a gentleman to be otherwise than jolly over it, so very merry, indeed, that she did n't seem to like it. "She had expected sentimental sighs,

sheep's eyes, allusions to old times, and such things. But the old gentleman poured forth a deluge of fun, and I joined him in increasing the good feeling. I have since been confidentially informed that I was never so brilliant in my life, in fact, perfectly fascinating! I went there regularly to dinner, and often met Wakefield, whose day of destiny was drawing near. They were to be married in a month, — that was fixed. I learned afterwards that it had been adjourned over a short time, and I could n't find out the reason. So I went up to Mr. Wolfe's house and settled Mr. C. Wakefield at one blow.

"Gentlemen, I could n't help it. There is a statute against cruelty to animals, and he was suffering.

"It is a peculiarity of mine, perhaps, that, when a case is decided against me, I bear no ill-will; and when it is for me, I always pity my opponent. Therefore it was, that 'as a man and a brother' lawyer I felt sorry for poor Wakefield when Fanny entered on her docket, 'Wakefield versus Wolfe. The plaintiff nonsuited.'

"But my grief was transient, for in that case, as in all cases against her, I was then, and still remain, the defendant's attorney, in fact and in law."

not been forced to improve their condition through the practice of the arts of design by wise men, to whom, as a matter of course, they have been duly ungrateful. Is it strange, then, that, being incapable of understanding what is for their own good, and naturally indisposed to do justice to their benefactors, men should be found incapable of comprehending the merits of those characters in whom individuality is strongly developed, and who have chosen to live according to their own sense of enjoyment, and not to take their rules of life from those outside barbarians who fill the census returns, and constitute "the masses"? Special injustice has been done all through the ages to a number of eminent personages, who have had as many stones thrown at them as if they had slept in cairns. It is not creditable to our time, when even Benedict Arnold has found something like an apologist, that the personages referred to should have no one to attempt to place their virtues before an unadmiring world. Books and articles have been written to show that Catiline, and Iscariot, and Tiberius, and Catherine de' Medici, and Henry VIII., and Claverhouse, and Robespierre, and others whose names are in humanity's black lists, were not half so bad as their reputations, — were, in some instances, eminently worthy creatures, who had been singularly misapprehended by mankind. But these are all first-class characters, — your first-rates, of whom one is naturally disposed to think well because they are first-rates, — and incapable of doing wrong, because they do it on so magnificent a scale. Catiline was a patriot, and only sought to anticipate Cæsar, but failed, poor man! Tiberius was a great statesman, who protected the Roman provincials, and did so by disposing of the aristocrats in Italy, -holding a wolf by the ears, as he phrased it, a wolf that would have devoured the flock, and torn the imperial shepherd, that model Pastor Fido, had he for a moment slackened his hold. Catherine de' Medici was a fine politician, a balancer of par

ties, who, if she did hound Catholics upon Huguenots, would have been quite as ready to hound Huguenots upon Catholics, had it paid as well. Henry VIII. was a martyr to his love of order and horror of civil war, and he made martyrs of his wives in the same cause, they being successively parts of himself, and bound to share his lot. Claverhouse was a devotee of the sentiment of loyalty. Robespierre was strictly and sternly honest, and, though he cut off people's heads, he never picked their pockets. And so on, to the end of the chapter of tyranny and crime. But there are other unappreciated characters, who, while they are often mentioned, cannot be called great, and whom the world treats as if they were all bad, and constantly holds up as warnings and examples. In behalf of these characters there is something to be said, and the attempt to reconcile them with humanity may not be entirely unprofitable, even if they are not so fortunate as to have perpetrated many murders.

One of the oldest of these characters, who has been doing service for almost thirty centuries, though nothing could be more out of character than that he should do anything, is the Sluggard of Solomon. In the Book of Proverbs, the royal Hebrew, who, like the Turkish Solyman, was the greatest of his line, apostrophizes the unhappy Sluggard, in good set terms, and, after recommending to him the example of that fussy little creature, the ant, which wasteth the summer time, and even that of autumn, in laboriously providing for a future that never may come, exclaims,"How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep." And has not the garden of the Sluggard, though for a very different reason, become as famous as the Garden of Eden, or that in which Diocletian cultivated cabbages for the market of Salona? Its broken walls, its crop of weeds, the cattle of the neighbors devouring the nothing which it raises, —

are they not familiar to us all from our youth upward, through the teachings of those who throw clouds over the hopes of childhood by enforcing upon the minds of boys and girls that they are doomed to work as long as they live? To a right-minded man there must occur much in favor of the Sluggard which he was too consistent a character to urge in his own defence. He was a sensible fellow, who was making the best of a wicked world. He was of the belief of those Oriental religionists, who hold that man approaches nearest to perfection in exact proportion to the profundity of his self-absorption and repose. He minded his own business, which is the surest way to make a fortune, and to avoid making mischief. All the great evil in the world is the consequence of the meddling propensities of active creatures, from Alexander the Great fool to the lowest village gossip. Take the recent history of our own country, with its big battles, bigger debts, and biggest taxes, to what is all our suffering due, but to the detestable activity of men who were nursed on the notion that they must be ever busy, and who learnt their lesson so well that they set a couple of millions of human beings flying at one another's throats, and called into existence an army of most industrious tax-gatherers? Who made the Secession war? Some four or five hundred men, who thought, with Hercules, that the earth was created only as a place for the master-spirits of the world to bustle in. They would have been blessings to their country, had they profited from the example of the Sluggard, and folded their hands to sleep. Had Mr. Davis, and Mr. Rhett, and Mr. Yancey, and Mr. Toombs, and other Southern leaders, been as lazy as they were industrious, our Eden never would have been disturbed, and we should have remained blissfully ignorant of much costly knowledge. But they scorned the Sluggard's course, and deemed it their duty to be most disastrously industrious. They would not give themselves up to slum

ber, and so they sent a half-million of their countrymen into that slumber which can be broken only by the archangel's trump. It is ever thus. It is only busy men, men of whom Byron was thinking when he said that "quiet to quick bosoms is a hell,” who make all that disturbance which costs so much, and for which quiet people have to pay, whether they will or not. No such charge can be advanced against men who model themselves on the Sluggard, and who are sublimely indifferent to all the ordinary and extraordinary objects of ambition. Lazy men, it must be admitted, do not accomplish much—they accomplish nothing-in behalf of what is called "the progress of the species"; but, on the other hand, they do not keep the world in hot water. They allow things to take their course. And it is by men of another sort endeavoring to do something for the race, — and a great deal for themselves, - that the earth is 'made to merit its title of à tomb. There is no counting the graves that active men have dug. They are the sexton's best supporters, and pass over to him the flower of mankind, cutting off, not merely the best youth of their countries, but the hope of reproduction. From Sesostris to Stonewall Jackson, it is the busy, the industrious, the meddling, the quarrelsome man who disturbs society, and forces it into courses that make it the purveyor for beasts of prey. Attila was well denominated "The Scourge of God," for he whipped men into unnatural activity, and prevented them from attending to what was properly their own business. He was one of those overseers who are miracles of restlessness, and who flog whole nations into the activity of war, the worst form that exertion always unpleasant-can take, save when it is dictated by the demands of unmistakable patriotism.

Had the Sluggard seen fit, for a moment, to depart from his character, he might have given Solomon some tolerably cogent reasons for his devotion to his bed and his love of slumber. But he was a wise man, and therefore he

would not contend against the wisest of men, who was a king to boot. He might have argued, that to get up and go to work would be to afford evidence that he was a wicked man, and was, in punishment for his sins, undergoing the common sentence. When our race fell through Adam's fall, the offended Creator passed upon it the sentence of hard labor for life, the world being the prison, and having, as Hamlet says, many wards. "Cursed is the ground for thy sake," are the words of that awful doom; "in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground." All work, therefore, is evidence of demerit, and the less work a man does, the more meritorious he must be. This is the philosophy of the eight-hour movement. The lazier a man is, the better he is. His sentence is a light one. Hence the Sluggard was a man of exemplary goodness. He did nothing, and was as useless as if he had been born the master of a thousand slaves. A conservative in principle, he adhered with strict fidelity to the faith in which he had been brought up, and was a true fainéant, and doubtless had locks as long (and uncombed) as those of any Merovingian king that ever allowed crown to fall from his head, and sceptre to drop from his hand, rather than make exertion to keep one or both. He did not even "daff the world aside, and bid it pass," for to do that would have required exertion. He "let it slide."

As to the ant, to which Solomon referred the Sluggard, it might have been replied to his Majesty, that that active insect often has its labor for its pains, and nothing more; and that in a moment it often loses the fruits of long months, if not years, of energetic industry. The hoofs of beasts and the feet of men crush thousands of ant-hills daily, a plain proof that industry does not always prosper, and leading irre

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sistibly to the conclusion that, though it is allowed, it is not enjoined. In countries where ants transact a large business, they often encounter most disastrous failures, like other speculators. In Southern Africa they build what are called edifices, and which are more deserving of the name than are many of the abodes of men, for they are so large and so strong that they will bear the weight of many men on their summit. And what follows from all this outlay of labor? Why, that the Aard Vark, or earth-hog, tears a hole in the side of one of these hills, “breaking up the stony walls with perfect ease," says Mr. Wood, "and scattering dismay among the inmates. As the ants run hither and thither, in consternation, their dwelling falling like a city shaken by an earthquake, the author of all this misery flings its slimy tongue among them, and sweeps them into its mouth by hundreds. Perhaps the ants have no conception of their great enemy as a fellow-creature, but look upon the Aard Vark as we look upon the earthquake, the plague, or any other disturbance of the usual routine of nature. Be this as it may, the Aard Vark tears to pieces many a goodly edifice, and depopulates many a swarming colony, leaving a mere shell of irregular stony wall in the place of the complicated and marvellous structure which had sheltered so vast a population."* Such is the reward of the ant's industry when most skilfully and wonderfully exerted; and as Solomon knew everything, it is strange that he should have had the face to fling the ant's action into the face of the Sluggard, who, had he not been restrained by indolence and good breeding, could easily have put down the royal argument. The ant is the type of most hard-working men, who accumulate largely, and go on swimmingly, making much of Mammon's muck, when along comes some Aard Vark in the shape of a cunning speculator, who sweeps it all away. The Sluggard has nothing of the kind to

* Homes without Hands, pp. 65, 66, - a delightful book for all who are fond of natural history.

fear, for he has nothing to lose. With him, time is money, but in a very different sense from that of the proverb. He spends his time as he goes, or, we should say, as he is carried along, for he is too wise to indulge in locomotion. So it was with the Sluggard of Solomon, who did not live to declare that all is vanity. He enjoyed the passing hour, and set a noble example to the sons of men, not one of whom would work if he could exist without having resort to the curse, -a curse as old as the expulsion from Eden. The Sluggard knew the bliss of repose, and might have cited Psalms against Proverbs, "He giveth his beloved sleep," had he deemed the matter one worthy of words, and of the exertion implied in quotation. But he said nothing, calmly maintaining his principles by a speaking silence, and concentrating all his energies on nothing. Like all genuinely lazy men, he was as incapable of thought as of envy; but if he could have thought about anything, the story of the Seven Sleepers would have filled his mind; and could he have envied anybody, it would have been that one of those sleepers who had the highest capacity for sleeping without dreams, and who therefore, in the Sluggard's estimation, had a better claim to be considered a wise man than could have been advanced even by Solomon himself.

Speaking of the Seven Sleepers, I am afraid that we do not always "realize" the full force of the old legend in which those gentlemen figure, or repose, and which has always been a favorite with me, because of the long, unbroken, delicious, dreamless slumber that is associated with it. Almost seventy thousand nights, and as many days of sleep, with no getting up in the morning, no beds to make, no servants to tell you to turn out, no bills to pay for lodging! It is too much for the human mind calmly to contemplate in all its details and all its force, and hence the vagueness with which the story and similar stories are generally mentioned. Past time is no time to us; and we lump together the ages that are

gone as if they were necessarily closely associated. Now, the Seven Sleepers' snooze lasted through one hundred and eighty-seven years; but their long night was so long ago that we do not understand how very long it lasted, or how very meritorious were those seven Ephesian youths who made themselves friends of darkness when the Pagan tyrant Decius had them walled up. We can form a better idea of the length of their slumber, and therefore the better appreciate the sublimity of their laziness, by supposing something of the kind to have happened here, and that the Seven Sleepers had just dropped in upon us. Let us suppose that in the year 1680,-just after the termination of Philip's War, and when the pious population of the Bay Colony were reposing in the arms of victory, and comfortably reflecting that little Phil (bloody heathen that he was!) had been sold into tropical slavery, - a sudden alarm came upon seven youths who were laboring in a maize-field, and that they, all unarmed, or panic-stricken, fled into some cave, under the belief that the impious Indians, whose lands they had helped to seize, were upon them. Away go Zebedee, Zachariah, Zadock, Zephaniah, Zimri, Zaccheus, and Zebulon, until they find a cave, in which, exhausted by their race, they drop asleep; and so profound is their rest, that it is not broken till the year 1867. Imagine their feelings when, having been roused by the shriek of a passing railway train, they rub their eyes, get up, and proceed to make their way to their homes! They would be as much astonished as if they had suddenly fallen upon a new planet. Between the Massachusetts of 1680 and the Massachusetts of 1867, the difference is so great that no mind can fairly grasp it; and the young Puritans, who would now be well advanced in their third century, would come to the conclusion that they had waked up in the other world, but in which part of it they would be terribly perplexed to say, when seeking to decide a question bearing so strongly on their everlasting welfare. Going to sleep when the Colony

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