"The morning hour has gold in its mouth." "An idle brain is Satan's workshop." "Idle folks lack no excuses. "Idle folks have the most labour." "Idleness is hunger's mother, and of theft full brother." "Sloth is the way to poverty.” CHAPTER XII. WHAT LAME FELIX SAID CONCERNING WORK. ALKING up Hoppit Hill about noontime one very hot summer's day, I saw Lame Felix a little way on ahead, toiling along with his crutch, occasionally stopping to take off his straw hat, pass his handkerchief over his face, shake his jacket into ship-shape, and otherwise cool himself. I soon overtook him, and saluting him said "Hard work this, Felix." "Hard work!" he replied in his usual hearty tone, "hard work! why, there is no such thing as hard work. Hard work means lazy people." "Oh," I exclaimed, "what a definition of hard work; I never heard such an one before; you surely don't mean it, Felix, do you?" A "Yes I do, lad; I think it's about as true a definition as I know. No work is hard to a willing mind. proverb truly says, 'Sloth makes all things difficult, but 188 A QUIET CHURCHYARD. industry all things easy. Let work appear ever so hard, begin it with a will, and bravely, and it is speedily accomplished. 'The will is the soul of the work.'" "What do you say, Felix, of people who have work to do for which they are altogether unfit; don't you think they would say there was such a thing as hard work? "But, my dear lad, it does not follow that because the work is unsuited to the man, that therefore it is hard." "Yes, I see what you mean," said I, after a pause. "Here we are at the churchyard; let us come in and rest; I love sitting in a churchyard, it is so cool and quiet, all noise and bustle seems excluded from such a place; here is the end of work, and of life! No, not so; for do we not read that 'their works do follow them." We entered by the gate opposite Parson Scaley's house, and beneath the shadow of a tree seated ourselves upon a flat tombstone. "Work," began Felix, laying his hat upon the grass, "work is the appointed lot of all; ever since the world began it has been so, and so it will continue unto its close. Everything has to work, everybody ought to work, a miserable man that one must be who tries to avoid it; to pass through life without doing something with hands, or head, or heart, is mean, cowardly, and dishonest. Labour has a bitter root, but a sweet taste, LITTLE DAFFYDOWNDILLY. 189 says the proverb. He who works well, eats well, sleeps well, and lives well, and commands the largest amount of happiness. 'He who will not strive in this world should not have come into it.' It is your idle, easy, striveless, do-nothing kind of people that fill the world with complaints and murmurs. Real workers, earnest workers, go on their way silently, and we only know of them by their works. Every boy should strive to acquire habits of industry. 'A young man idle, an old man needy,' is a true proverb; see, then, how essential it is to acquire the habit of earnest working, for by so doing you are laying up provender for old age. Go where you may, you will find work is the law of life; these found it so who are lying so still and silent around us now; go into town or country, village or city, it is the same still. "Little Daffydowndilly ran away from school because he did not like his schoolmaster, Mr Toil, whom he thought severe, harsh, and unjust; he determined to go where there was no work, no lessons, but where all was ease and play. But go where he might, he always saw a Mr Toil. He took an old, grave, and sedate looking man as his companion, and as they passed the meadow they saw Mr Toil making hay; when they peeped into the workshop they saw him planeing wood; he marched past them to the sound of fife and drum at the head of a regiment of soldiers; they found him dancing on the village green, and lazily slumber |