1 1 8 Musings by Camp- Fire and Wayside 



these presents preaching includes the men who eat a 

 hasty breakfast, and then plunge into money-mak- 

 ing — and drag their employes into it along with 

 them. They come home from business fagged out. 

 They eat and sleep and go back to the everlasting 

 money-getting grind. So years come and go — they 

 get money, build fine houses, get more money, grow 

 sickly, or old, and die. What good is there in it? 

 Their young people never have any real young life. 

 They cram, cram, cram their poor heads with edu- 

 cation. It is day school and Sunday school and 

 high school and college and reading and preaching 

 till they are old enough to marry, then they marry 

 because that is a part of the business of life, and go 

 on getting money. 



Now I have no money to speak of — never had — 

 I have had to work hard, and yet have had a very 

 happy life; and I will venture to say that I now get 

 more pleasure out of the little wages which my 

 readers of The Interior pay me for writing for them, 

 than any rich man in the city gets out of his tens of 

 thousands or millions. It is not in the way of so- 

 ciability, though. There is none of the genuine 

 article there — no time for it. I would as soon 

 expect to go to Jeremiah's valley of dry bones and 

 sit down on a pile of skulls, and have a sociable 

 time with the osseous remains of the dead, as to 

 expect it in Chicago. A happy life is to be had by 

 making rational enjoyment one of the objects of 

 life. And that is not in money-getting. It is not 



