is a very commendable way of thinking about the matter. But, as an amateur philosopher, I warn you never to let yourself get under practical bondage to such notions. I tell you when you betake yourself to music or painting, carpentry or gardening, as a means of getting through the day, you are sapping your mental constitution and shortening your life: unless you are sustained by more than ordinary littleness of mind you will never see threescore and ten. All these things are good in proportion as you have difficulty in finding time for them. When you have to rise early in the morning and work hard to make a little leisure for your favourite hobby, then you are getting its blessing. Now, the _Dirzee_ is not a means of killing time. On the contrary, I see that he compels his mistress to take thought how she may save time alive, if she wishes to get anything done. He hurries the day along and scatters its hours, so that _ennui_ cannot find an empty minute to lurk in. I do not deny that he is the occasion of a few provocations, and the simile of the fly is just; but are not provocations an element in the interest of every pursuit, the pepper which flavours all pleasant occupation? I collect butterflies, and my friends think I am a man to be envied because I have such a taste. Do they suppose a butterfly catcher has no provocations? Was it seventeen or seventy times (I forget) in one page that I laid down my pen, put off my spectacles and caught up my net to rush after that brute of a _Papilio polymnestor_, who just came to the _duranta_ flowers to flout me and skip over the wall into the next garden? And does anyone but a butterfly hunter know how it feels to open your cabinet drawers just a few hours after the ants have got the news that the camphor is done? Does anyone but an entomologist know the grub of _Dermestes intolerabilis_? Why should a collection of butterflies be called an object of perennial interest and delight, and the _Dirzee_ an unmitigated provocation? They are both of one family. Nothing is unmitigated in this world.