"My boy, you are entering by sloth into the most laborious of existences. Ah! you declare yourself an idler, then prepare yourself for labor. Have you ever seen a formidable machine which is called a rolling-mill? You must be on your guard against it; for it is a crafty and ferocious thing, and if it catch you by the skirt of the coat it drags you under it entirely. Such a machine is indolence. Stop while there is yet time, and save yourself, otherwise it is all over with you, and ere long you will be among the cog-wheels. Once caught, hope for nothing more. You will be forced to fatigue yourself, idler; and no rest will be allowed you, for the iron hand of implacable toil has seized you. You refuse to earn your livelihood, have a calling, and accomplish a duty. It bores you to be like the rest; well, you will be different. Labor is the law, and whoever repulses it as a bore must have it as a punishment. You do not wish to be a laborer, and you will be a slave. Toil only lets you loose on one side to seize you again on the other; you do not wish to be its friend, and you will be its negro. Ah, you did not care for the honest fatigue of men, and you are about to know the sweat of the damned; while others sing you will groan. You will see other men working in the distance, and they will seem to you to be resting. The laborer, the reaper, the sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in the light like the blessed inmates of a paradise. What a radiance there is in the anvil! What joy it is to guide the plough, and tie up the sheaf! What a holiday to fly before the wind in a boat! But you, idler, will have to dig and drag, and roll and walk. Pull at your halter, for you are a beast of burden in the service of hell! So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you will not have a week, a day, an hour without feeling crushed. You will not be able to lift anything without agony, and every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is a feather for others will be a rock for you, and the most simple things will become steep. Life will become a monster around you, and coming, going, breathing, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will produce in you the effect of a hundred-pound weight; and going there sooner than here will be a problem to solve. Any man who wishes to go out, merely opens his door and finds himself in the street; but if you wish to go out you must pierce through your wall. What do honest men do to reach the street? They go downstairs; but you will tear up your sheets, make a cord of them fibre by fibre, then pass through your window and hang by this thread over an abyss. And it will take place at night, in the storm, the rain, or the hurricane; and if the cord be too short you will have but one way of descending, by falling--falling haphazard into the gulf, and from any height, and on what? On some unknown thing beneath. Or you will climb up a chimney at the risk of burning yourself; or