“What up-hill work it is, that beginning of the pilgrimage. And how confidently we start in the glorious ignorance of youth, heads erect, backs straightened, footsteps springing like a deer, with an utter disregard of warning, a sovereign contempt for advice. Like myself, I doubt not you have scaled many a hill, even when you carried more flesh than you do now. Don’t you remember, in the clear, pure mountain air, how near the top looked from the valley down below? Don’t you remember how, about noonday, still full of strength and spirit, though having done a stalwart spell of work, you spied the ridge that you were convinced must be your goal, and strained on, panting, heated, labouring, yet exultant, because success was so nearly within your grasp? A few more strides—hurrah! your chin is level with the ridge, and lo! there is another precisely similar to be surmounted at about the same angle and the same distance. Not yet discouraged, only a little startled and annoyed; till another and another have been gained, and so surprise becomes disappointment, vexation, misgiving, discomfiture, and lastly, but to the strongest natures, despair! Even with these, when the real summit has been at length attained, all their long-looked-for enjoyment resolves itself into the negative satisfaction of rest; and for one who thus arrives exhausted at his destination, think how many a footsore, quivering, way-wearied wanderer must lie out all night shelterless, on the barren, wind-swept hill. “It seems that the process, termed at Newmarket ‘putting a race-horse through the mill,’ is practised with the human subject till he has learned the disheartening lesson that labour pushed to exhaustion borders on pain—that heartbreaking efforts, while they lower the tone of our whole system, are apt to destroy the very efficiency they are intended to enhance. I have heard good judges affirm that even at Newmarket they are apt to overtrain their horses. Do you not think that we, too, should run the race of life on better terms were we not put so pitilessly ‘through the mill’?”