and incalculable waste?” His backbone creaks uncomfortably while he moves in his chair. “Waste?” he repeats in the hushed, placid tones that make him so invaluable as a companion—“Waste? The subject is by no means limited. I have some experience in it of my own. Would you favour me with your ideas?”—and I go off at score with— CHAPTER I “ON WASTE” “Why are these things so?” I exclaim, plumping down again into my seat. “Why have the times been out of joint ever since Hamlet’s first appearance on the stage, with black tights and rosettes in his shoes? Why is the whole world still at sixes and sevens? What is the object of it all? _Cui bono? cui bono? cui bono?_ Is there the slightest appearance of a result? Any tendency towards a goal? Shall we ever get _anywhere_, or are we travelling perpetually in a circle, like squirrels in a cage, convicted pickpockets on the treadmill? By the way, who convicted the pickpockets, and sentenced them? The sitting magistrate, of course; and do the awards of that worthy functionary produce any definite result in the direction of good order and morality, or must his daily incubation, too, be wasted upon addled eggs? Do you remember the story of the man who cut his throat because he was so tired of dressing and undressing every day? Don’t shake your head—I beg pardon, your skull—you told it me yourself. I can appreciate his prejudices, but how did he know there might not be buttons and buttonholes where he was going? That is, supposing he went anywhere—if he didn’t, he was wasted altogether. If he did, perhaps he was of no use when he got there. Wasted again—only a human life after all. Not much when you think of it amongst the millions that cling about this old globe of ours, rising, swarming, disappearing like the maggots on a dead horse, but of no light importance to the bearer when you remember its weight of sorrows, anxieties, disappointments, and responsibilities, not to mention the Black Care sitting heavily at the top to keep the whole burden in its place. Life is a bubble, they say. Very well—-but is it blown from a soap-dish by a school-boy, rising heavenward, tinted with rainbow hues, to burst only when at its most beautiful and its best? Or is it not rather a bubble gurgling to the surface from the agonised lungs of some struggling wretch drowning far below in the dark, pitiless water, ‘Unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown’? —Wasted, too, unless the fish eat him, and then who knows? None of us perhaps may ever eat the fish.