When I wrote the irrelevant, drowsy chapter preceding this, the sun shone so kindly, and so benignly Nature beamed, that Care was as a dream of what never could have been.
To live was to be blessed; to think was to enjoy. Nature was a doting mother that fed us with bounty and kissed us fondly to rest; the earth a sunny garden; heaven a waste of luxurious fancy.
How blind I must have been! What a glorious blindness it would be, if----
My drop from the rosy clouds began pleasantly enough. I was nooning by the river-side, when an ancient, second-hand Danish pirate, with improbable pantomime whiskers, like tangled seaweed, fixedly looking at the lower part of my waistcoat, casually remarked, "Seems to me you're pining away down there."
"Yes," I answered briskly, "I'm not the man I was."
"No," said he meditatively, "we're none of us as young as we was; but, come, you can't be more than forty-three."
"I am," I answered indignantly, "no more than thirty-six."
"Well," said he, with what may have been a consolatory intent, "we can't help our looks, none of us. I'm judging you'll not be for the lifeboat when you're my age."
I had decided to speak to him no more, but an undefined hope to get the better of his sauciness prompted me to ask, "What age may that be?"
"You look," said I vindictively, "a great deal older."
Scarce had the words left my mouth than I was ashamed of them. I saw for the first time now that he was crippled, and walked with a stick. Rough weather and a hard life had left on him a low-water mark of rust and wear and decay. But he answered, gently enough, "It's like enough I may. I've been very bad this three week. Got tangled in a rope and fell overboard, and was dragged ashore through the water from the pierhead to the harbour. My uncle and two other young fellows was in the boat, but"--
The "two other young fellows" was tempting, but I did not smile.
"They couldn't get me in," he continued unconsciously, "and I got knocked about a bit. My shoulder was main bad. I'm crawling about again, but it's hard work doing nothing."
I repeated the words to myself as I walked away, "hard work doing nothing"--especially when "doing nothing" means a bare cupboard and hungry children, eh?