Of the many precious immunities that belong to humble station there are none more valuable than the freedom from false amusements. A poor man is under one obligation, he must work, but his work itself is a blessed deliverance from a thousand other obligations. He is not obliged to shoot, and hunt, and dance against his will, he is not obliged to affect interest and pleasure in games that only weary him, he has not to receive tiresome strangers in long ceremonious repasts when he would rather have a simple short dinner with his wife. Béranger sang the happiness of beggars with his sympathetic humorous philosophy, but in all seriousness it might be maintained that the poor are happier than they know. They get their easy unrestrained human intercourse by chance meetings, and greetings, and gossipings, and they are spared all the acting, all the feigning, that is connected with the routine of imposed enjoyments. Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure. You dislike accounts and you dislike balls, but though your dislike may be nearly equal in both cases you will assuredly find that the time hangs less heavily when you are resolutely grappling with the details of your account-books than when you are only wishing that the dancers would go to bed. The reason is that any hard work, whatever it is, has the qualities of a mental tonic, whereas unenjoyed pleasures have an opposite effect, and even though work may be uncongenial you see a sort of result, whilst a false pleasure leaves no result but the extreme fatigue that attends it,--a kind of fatigue quite exceptional in its nature, and the most disagreeable that is known to man. The dislike for false amusements is often misunderstood to be a puritanical intolerance of all amusement. It is in this as in all things that are passionately enjoyed,--the false thing is most disliked by those who best appreciate the true. What may be called the truth or falsehood of amusements is not in the amusements themselves, but in the relation between one human idiosyncrasy and them. Every idiosyncrasy has its own strong mysterious affinities, generally distinguishable in childhood, always clearly distinguishable in youth. We are like a lute or a violin, the tuned strings vibrate in answer to certain notes but not in answer to others.