Gustavus continues to smoke, and Easy continues to do it. But there is another saying quite as wise as that of Rogue Riderhood, which exhorts him who puts his hand to the plough not to look back. The trouble with Riderhood's apothegm is that it supplies an endless excuse for not doing it. If the habit is too strong, and will not budge, you can soothe your conscience and make the most plausible of pleas by insisting that human nature and long custom and uniform tradition and the honest doubt whether smoking is, after all, injurious, must all be carefully considered. That is what Dickens also calls the great art of how not to do it. "My son, if you wish a thing done, do it yourself; if not, send," said the wise father; and the pioneers, the men without whose one idea and uncompromising energy and conciliation nothing would be accomplished, say with Sumner. "There is but one side," and with Cato, "_Delenda est Carthago_." It is true that everything cannot be done at once, but something must be done all the time; and you will observe that it is not when the work is advancing, but when it stops or goes backward, that we hear the familiar wisdom of the Rogue that Easy does it. That is what makes it a suspicious saying, "What are you doing, sir?" thundered the master to the boy. "Nothing, sir," replied the frightened pupil. "Just as I thought, sir. Don't you know that your business is to do something?" When a man says "Easy does it," he may be doing all that he can but the immense probability, the almost absolute certainty, is that he is doing nothing, or, like the amiable Gustavus, he is "beginning to prepare to begin." SISTE, VIATOR. It is still very difficult to discover where the bad people are buried. The cemeteries are still symbolically white with monuments to the departed. Shylock and Ralph Nickleby are still, upon their tombstones, the most respected of deceased citizens. Here lies Clytemnestra, a model of the wifely virtues, whom an inconsolable spouse deplores. Beneath this marble, in the tranquil hope of a joyful resurrection, repose the remains of Iago, who kept the noiseless tenor of his way. Beyond sleeps Solomon, most faithful of husbands; and under this turf of buttercups and daisies lie Paris and Lovelace, _arcades ambo_, too early lost. 'Tis pathetic to reflect how much worthier is the world under-ground than that which still cumbers its surface; and if we, whose lives are indifferent honest, had only had the good fortune to die a century ago, our memories would by this time have been upon our tombstones a very odor of sanctity to the sense of the age which knows us, perhaps, but too well.