TOO LITTLE TO DO.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume I, Issue 62, 13 November 1880, Page 2 (Supplement)

TOO LITTLE TO DO.

I am always very sorry for those who have too little to do. They seem to me scarcely to have a fair chance in the world. Their natures are not properly taxed and tested, trained and- developed. They might have been among the great and wise and good and famous in the world, bat they have fallen back into the ranks of the Ignamm pecus. Their- liberation from the common cares and activities of life, of which, perhaps, they prided. and plumed themselves, is their drawback and their band, It is even possible that it may help to kill them. A traveller who visited the Pitcairn islanders in their lonely Pacific home found some of them dying of sheer old age when between fifty and sixty. They had too little to do. ..The rough fibre of life, for its due adjustment, needs a certain amount of work and worry —of working against the collar, of straining against wind and tide. One day two strangers met at a little inn in the Isle of Wight. One was a medical man; the other was a man of letters, whose avocations gave him incessant work, and called him into all sorts of places. I expect that the same desire for repose had brought them through different paths to this same qaiefc haven of rest. In the morning the spatial correspondent — so we had better designate him— lay languidly on the grass, plucking buttercups and daisies, , and gazing languidly into the blue depths of the sky. Charles James Fox used to say that there was only one thing better than lying on the grass with a book, and that was lying on the grass without a book. The medical man watched him. Those medical men often have a trick of watching every one. Their fellow-creatures are their books, and they get into the habit of scanning such pages very swiftly. " Sir," said tne medical man, " I should think that you were rather fond of lying on the graßS and gathering daises." " Sir, 1 ' was the answer, " I hnvo a pasalon for it. I should like nothing better in life than to He on the ground and pluok the daises."

"And yet, sir," was the rejoinder, (t I have a strong idea that you are • man who goes about a great deal in the world, and takes an interest in a great many subjects." " I go about a great deal too much, and work a great deal more than I like. 11 1 had my oboioe in life, I ihould lie all daylong on the grass and pick daises." "Do you know, sir, what would bo the probable result ol yoor haying too little to do?"

"Well, what would it be?" ' " It woaW probably ba an attack «| paralyse. To shut np work would probably be to olosayour existence.'! < And praotioally this ii a kind of thing whioh does not happen so infrequently ai might be supposed. It is always a danger000 otiMin jor the professional man who retires from the. {all tido ofbastntM with, out hating Iwrnid. tin trt o( cultivating and.

enjoying leisure. Men of the highest profes sional eminence have found themselves absolutely stranded when they have passed ftom the condition of having too much to that of too little to do. One might here tell tragic narratives of melancholy despair and suicide.