[Picture: The Dhobie] I AM an amateur philosopher and amuse myself detecting essence beneath semblance and tracing the same principle running through things the outward aspect of which is widely different. I have studied the _Dhobie_ in this spirit and find him to be nothing else than an example of the abnormal development, under favourable conditions, of a disposition which is not only common to humanity, but pervades the whole animal kingdom. A puppy rending slippers, a child tearing up its picture books, a mungoose killing twenty chickens to feed on one, a freethinker demolishing ancient superstitions, what are they all but _Dhobies_ in embryo? Destruction is so much easier than construction, and so much more rapid and abundant in its visible results, that the devastator feels a jubilant joy in his work, of which the tardy builder knows nothing. As the lightning scorns the oak, as the fire triumphs over the venerable pile, as the swollen river scoffs at the P. W. D., while arch after arch tumbles into its gurgling whirlpools, so the _Dhobie_, dashing your cambric and fine linen against the stones, shattering a button, fraying a hem, or rending a seam at every stroke, feels a triumphant contempt for the miserable creature whose plodding needle and thread put the garment together. This feeling is the germ from which the _Dhobie_ has grown. Day after day he has stood before that great black stone and wreaked his rage upon shirt and trowser and coat, and coat and trowser and shirt. Then he has wrung them as if he were wringing the necks of poultry, and fixed them on his drying line with thorns and spikes, and finally he has taken the battered garments to his torture chamber and ploughed them with his iron, longwise and crosswise and slantwise, and dropped glowing cinders on their tenderest places. Son has followed father through countless generations in cultivating this passion for destruction, until it has become the monstrous growth which we see and shudder at in the _Dhobie_. But I find in him, at least, an illustration of another human infirmity. He takes in hand to eradicate the dirt which defiles the garment. But the one is closely mingled with the very fibres of the other, the one is impalpable, the other bulky and substantial, and so the torrent of his zealous rage unconsciously turns against the very substance of that which he set himself lovingly to purge and restore to its primitive purity. Indeed, I sometimes find that, while he has successfully wrecked the garment, he has overlooked the dirt! Greater and better men than the _Dhobie_ are employed in the same way. Such are the consolations of philosophy, “But there was never yet philosopher Who could endure the toothache patiently,”