day through toilful years, fashioning everything from a pin’s head to a ship’s mast; the suspended click of millions of sewing machines, above which bend delicate women stitching their lives into shirts and garments that find their way onto bargain tables, where rich women crowd to seize the advantage of the discount.  Let all suspended hammers in the myriad workshops swing into silence and all footsteps cease their weary plodding to and fro, I think the awful hush would far transcend the muteness of midnight or that still hour when dawn steals in among the pallid stars, and on the dim, uncertain shore of time the tide of man’s vitality ebbs faint and low.  There is no blight so fell as the blight of enforced calm.  It is in the unworked garden that weeds grow.  It is in the stagnant water that disease germs waken to horrid life.  Ennui palls upon a brave heart.  Ennui is like a long-winded, amiable, but watery-idea’d friend who drops in to see us and dribbles platitudes until every nerve is tapped.  Ennui is like being forced to drink tepid water or to eat soup without salt.  Labor, on the contrary, is like a friend with grit and tonic in his make-up.  It comes to us as a wind visits the forest, and sets our faculties stirring as the wind rustles the leaves and sets the wood fragrance flying.  It puts spice in our broth and ice in our drink.  It puts a flavor in life that starts an appetite, or, in other words, awakens ambition.  Although the world is full of toilers it would be worse off were it full of idlers.  Good, hard workers find no time to make mischief.  Your anarchists and your breeders of discord are never found among busy men; they breed, like mosquitoes, out of stagnant places.  It is the idle man that quickens hatred and contention, as it is the setting hen and not the scratching one that hatches out the eggs.

XLVI.

Painting the old Homestead.

It had been a battle renewed for more years than there are dandelions just now in the front yard.  Various members of the family had declared from time to time that if the old house was not painted it would fall to pieces from sheer mortification at its own disreputable appearance.

“Why, you can put your toothpick right through the rotten shingles,” cried the doctor.  “The only way to save it is to paint it.”

Now, I have always been the odd sheep of a highly decorous fold.  I have more love for nature than hard good sense, I am told.  So I loathe paint just as I hate surface manners.  I want the true grain all the way through, be it in boards or people.  I love the weather stain on an old house.  I love the mossy touches, the lichen grays and the russet browns that age imparts to the shingles, and I almost feel like murdering the paint fiend when he comes around every spring, and transforms some dear old landmark into a gorgeous “Mrs. Skewton,”