Arthur Megrim. I believe the doctor had a strong fancy for my sister; but she used to declare she could never think of marrying, and thus being drawn from what she felt to be the chief duty of her existence, namely--the care of my digestive apparatus. 3. CHAPTER III. THE EMPLOYMENTS OF A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF FORTUNE. And now, having mentioned tedium of existence as being an evil to which I soon felt myself subject, I will say that it was one I found more oppressive than the reader can readily imagine. I had nothing in the world to do, and, as it happened, my disposition did not lead me to seek any thing. I was, in a word, the very man my sister had so reproachfully called me in our first conversation--that is, the laziest man in all Virginia; and, upon reflection, I can think of no person in the world who would bear a comparison with me in that particular, except myself. "None but himself can be his parallel," as somebody or other says, I don't know who, a sentiment that is supposed to be absurd, inasmuch as it involves an impossibility, but which becomes good sense when applied to me. In my original condition, in the body in which I was first introduced to life, I certainly had a great aversion to all troublesome employments, whether of business or amusement, being supposed by many persons to be _then_ what as many considered me now--to wit, the laziest man in my state. Whether I was lazier as Sheppard Lee the Jerseyman or Arthur Megrim the Virginian, I am not able to say. In both cases indolence was at the bottom of all my troubles. There was this difference, however, between the two conditions, that whereas I had felt in one the evils of laziness to a poor man, I was now to discover in the other what were its evils to a man of fortune. My chief employments in the body of Mr. Arthur Megrim were eating and sleeping; and I certainly should have done nothing else, had I been allowed to follow my own humours. Eating and sleeping, therefore, consumed the greater portion of my time; but it could not consume all; nor could the residue be filled up by the occasional excursions in my curricle, and the still more unfrequent strolls through the village, into which I was driven by my affectionate sister, or cajoled by her coadjutor, the doctor, in their zealous care of my digestive apparatus. As for visits and visitations, I abhorred them all, whether they related to the bustling young gentlemen of the neighbourhood, or the loquacious ladies, old and young, who cultivated the friendship of my sister.