One year, Good Friday passed,
and Easter-time had progressed to the joyful Monday, ere cognisance of
the season came. Speedy is the descent to the automaton. A mechanical
mis-entry in the diary threw all the orderly days of the week into a
whirling jumble. We knew not Wednesday from Thursday, nor Thursday from
Friday, though we calculated and checked notes of the transactions and
traits of successive days. To what purpose was the effort to memorise
one day from another when all were precisely alike in colour and
uneventfulness? Each day had been blue--radiantly blue--nothing more. And
the entries in the diary set at naught dogmatic assertions of disproof.
But the steamer cuts a deep weekly notch. We jolted into it and became
harmonised once more with the rigid calendar of the workaday world.
Thus we keep the noiseless tenor of our way, finding in life if not
great and gaudy pleasures, at least content and relief from many of the
vexations that gnaw away the lives of the multitude. Though it was
acknowledged a long time ago to be--indecorous--an abominable thing for a
man to commend his ways; though his mode of living may not commend
itself to others; though it may seem blank and colourless, thin and
watery, devoid of expectation, and the hope of fame, name, and that kind
of success which comes of the acquirement of riches, yet--and in a spirit
of thankfulness be it said--the obscure and minor part the writer plays
in the tragic-comedy of life affords gratification.
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