8? Idle Days in Pafaoouia. 



alwa^^s CiiUcil it black, although it may now seem 

 purple or blue or some other colour. We Icaru a 

 kind of emasculated lauguage iu the nursery, from 

 schoolmasters, and books written indoors, and it 

 has to scr^e us. It proves false, but its falsity is 

 ]ierhaps never clearly recognized ; nature eman- 

 cipates us and the fecliug cliangcs, l)ut there has 

 been no conscious reasoning on the matter, and 

 thought is vague. One hears a person I'elating the 

 struggles and storms of his early or past life, and 

 receiving without protest expressions of sympathy 

 and pity from his listeuers ; but he knows in his 

 heart, albeit his brain may bo and generally is in a 

 mist, that these were the very things that exhilarated 

 him, that if he had missed them his life would have 

 been savourless. For the healthy man, or for the 

 ]uan whose virile iustincts have not become 

 atropliied in the artificial conditions we exist iu, 

 strife of some kind, if uot riliysical then mental, is 

 essential to liappiness. It is a principle of nature 

 that only by means of strife can strength be main- 

 tained. No sooner is any species placed above it, 

 or over-protected, than degeneration f)egius. But 

 al)Out the condition of the inferior animals, with 

 regard to the com]:)aratiA'e duluess or l)rightness of 

 their lives, we do not concern ourselves. It is 

 pleasant to be able to Ijelieve that they arc all in a 

 sense ha])p_y, although hard to believe that they are 

 happy in the same degree. The sloth, for instance, 

 that most over-protected mammalian, fast asleep 

 as he hno's his branch, and the wild cat that has to 



