No. 3 was always willing to listen to Aunt Judy.

He desired nothing better than to get her undivided attention, and pour out his groans in her ear; so he sat down with a very good grace, and proceeded to insist that there never was anything so “slow” as “it was.”

Aunt Judy wanted to know what it was; the place or the people, (including herself,) or what?

No. 3 could explain it no other way than by declaring that everything was slow; there was nothing to do.

Aunt Judy maintained that there was plenty to do.

Whereupon No. 3 said:-

“But nothing worth doing.”

Whereupon Aunt Judy told No. 3 that he was just like Dr. Faustus.  On which, of course, No. 3 wanted to know what Dr. Faustus was like, and Aunt Judy answered, that he was just like him, only a great deal older and very learned.

“Only quite different, then,” suggested No. 3.

“No,” said Aunt Judy, “not quite different, for he came one day to the same conclusion that you have done, namely, that there was nothing to do, worth doing in the world.”

“I don’t say the world, I only say here,” observed No. 3; “there’s plenty to do elsewhere, I dare say.”

“So you think, because you have not tried else where,” answered Aunt Judy.  “But Dr. Faustus, who had tried elsewhere, thought everywhere alike, and declared there was nothing worth doing anywhere, although he had studied law, physic, divinity, and philosophy all through, and knew pretty nearly everything.”

“Then you see he did not get much good out of learning,” remarked No. 3.

“I do see,” was the reply.

“And what became of him?”

“Ah, that’s the point,” replied Aunt Judy, “and a very remarkable point too.  As soon as he got into the state of fancying there was nothing to do, worth doing, in God’s world, the evil spirit came to him, and found him something to do in what I may, I am sure, call the devil’s world—­I mean, wickedness.”

“Oh, that’s a story written upon Watts’s old hymn,” exclaimed No. 3, contemptuously:-

“’For Satan finds some mischief still,
For idle hands to do.’

Judy!  I call that a regular ‘Sell.’”

" Not a bit of it,” cried Aunt Judy, warmly; “I don’t suppose the man who wrote the story ever saw Watts’s hymns, or intended to teach anything half as good.  It’s mamma’s moral.  She told me she had screwed it out of the story, though she doubted whether it was meant to be there.”

“And what’s the rest of the story then?” inquired No. 3, whose curiosity was aroused.

“Well! when the old Doctor found the world as it was, so ‘slow,’ as you very unmeaningly call it, he took to conjuring and talking with evil spirits by way of amusement; and then they easily persuaded him to be wicked, merely because it gave him something fresh and exciting to do.”