WHAT I LIVED FOE. 
99 
know it by experience, and be able to give a true ac¬ 
count of it in my next excursion. For most men, it 
appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, 
whether it is of the devil or of God, and have some¬ 
what hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man 
here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” 
Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells 
us that we were long ago changed into men; like pyg- 
* mies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and 
clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion 
a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frit¬ 
tered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need 
to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases 
he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, 
simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two 
or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a 
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on 
your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of 
civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quick¬ 
sands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a 
man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the 
bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, 
and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. 
Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it 
be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, 
five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is 
like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, 
with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a 
German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any mo¬ 
ment. The nation itself, with all its so called internal 
improvements, which, by the way, are all external and 
superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown es¬ 
tablishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by 
