lence at particular epochs, and dyspepsia and gout, the lashes which our pleasant vices make for themselves, are especially prevalent in an age in which gastronomic science has reached its culminating point. What men need most to understand is the connection between mind and body; the fact that if we overfeed the body and underfeed the mind there will be a vengeance exacted for either error; and that we need to understand the nature of the organisation which should be our servant and not our master, and appreciate the benign effects of simplicity and repose, and those old fashions, so often unduly discredited, of temperance and self-denial.

Best.

THERE comes a time in a man's life when he looks out for pauses and periods of rest. There is a time when a man is overflowing with energy. He both finds work and makes work. He cuts down trees in the forest of difficulty. He fights with windmills. He sketches out a programme which it would take several lifetimes to encompass.

He puts no limit to

By and by

his energies or his range of possibilities. a man finds that his sphere is strictly limited and defined. He seeks to curtail rather than extend his engagements. He no longer thinks that he can know everybody and go everywhere, but recognises that in fact he can, comparatively, only know few persons and go to a few places. He understands small economies of time and circumstances. He appreciates the laissez faire. He has a growing opinion in favour of holidays. Instead of being always busy, he appreciates pauses from business. He studies to be quiet. He begins to think that speech is silvern and silence is golden. He appreciates rest.

He appreciates rest if it is only for the sake of work, according to the laws of action and reaction. Hence, if you can economise seasons of rest, you really secure opportunities of work. In London every man seems in a hurry, and every man has his programme too full. You note the Londoner's short, quick, and somewhat impatient walk. If he goes out to dinner, he has been working up to the last minute; at a place of amusement he is too thoroughly tired to enjoy himself: even on a holiday he is busy with his schemes of work. A man can do no justice to dinner, holiday, or concert when his most pressing need is that he should lie upon a sofa or go to bed. Hence come nervousness, indigestion, bad nights, fatty degeneration, and all kinds of horrors. It is here that the smokers have a great pull over the non-smoking part of the community. They understand how to take things quietly. They may like the aroma of the weed, but the indirect result of the rest is chiefly valuable to them. once remonstrated with a friend rather hastily on his childishness in stopping to look at the shop-windows. He might have answered that to look at the shopwindows was itself a part of a liberal education. No Oriental bazaar equals the bazaar of the London shops. But he told me that he was in the habit of walking a great deal too fast, and consequently he would every now and then bring himself to anchor

I

in front of a shop-window, and counted the rest as gain. For my own part, I delight, when practicable, to turn in' for an afternoon service at the Abbey or St. Paul's. There is something ineffably soothing and restful in the coolness, the shade, the stillness, the silvery echo of a noble voice, the soaring or sinking of the music amid the old arches.

The taste for rest grows with our growth in wisdom. A child cannot understand it. When a Ichild is told that his father or mother wants to be quiet, the sentence is a wonderment to him. Mrs. Schimmelpenninck says that, when she was a child of six, her parents taught her to fold her hands and be quiet for half-an-hour. This valuable art might be taught at our schools, even if charged for as an extra. The taste for quiet and thoughtfulness ought to be developed as much as any other taste. Rest is an investment for action. All mere friction, friction and nothing more, is waste and loss. The wasted sparkle and glitter might have been consolidated into the diamond. There is a balance and equipoise in Nature, and any caloric that is uselessly given off is a deduction from the sum of vital heat. If you watch agricultural life you may see, on a large scale, how rest affects labour. In the winter the labourer's day is very short. He gets up at a very late hour, and goes to bed at an extraordinary early hour. His object is to economise

In

light and fuel. He often takes in winter nearly twice as much sleep as he takes in summer. summer he will get up at four in the morning and work at night while the latest gleam of sunset lasts. It would be utterly impossible for a labourer to do his summer work unless he had stored up force during his winter rest. In the old days when warfare was chronic, winter-quarters were necessary to the summer campaign. In rest you recuperate from fatigue, and you also store up force for action. The prophet is sent into the wilderness before he begins his mission amid cities. In the lives of various great men you will find periods in which they seemed condemned to inactivity. But they were merely couchant for a spring. In fact, I have known energetic men who, in very quiet times, ask themselves, for what special work they are reserved, and are firm in the belief that their rest simply means that there will assuredly be a strain upon their energies. And they find that thus it comes to

pass.

There are all kinds of ways for economising rest. And just in proportion as a man realises the preciousness of effort and of work, as he would desire not to lead a feeble life of ineffectual aims, so far will he be jealous of useless effort, and desire to spare himself all friction and controversy. Life is too short for quarrelling, and for a lot of other things as well.