energizes his schools and beats up recruits for his parish penny readings; he lends his pulpit to missionary delegates and takes the chair at the meeting for the conversion of Jews; he does his duty, poor man, so far as he knows how and so far as nature gave him the power; but his feet are in pinching shoes all his life long, and no amount of walking on the clerical highway can ever make them pleasant wearing. Or he may have a passionate love for the sea, and be mewed up in a lawyer's musty office where his large limbs have not half enough space for their natural activity; where he is perched for twelve hours out of the twenty-four on a high stool against a desk instead of climbing cat-like up the ropes; and where he is set to engross a longwinded deed of conveyance, or to make a fair copy of a bill of costs, instead of bearing a hand in a gale and saving his ship by pluck and quickness. He could save a ship better than he can engross a deed; while, as for law, he cannot get as much of that into his heavy brain as would enable him to advise a client on the simplest case of assault; but he knows all the differences of rig, and the whole code of signals, and can tell you to a nicety about the flags of all nations, and the name and position of every spar and stay and sheet, and when to reef and when to set sail, with any other nautical information to be had from books and a chance cruise as far as the Nore. That pen behind his ear never ceases to gall and fret; his shoe never ceases to pinch; and to the last day of his life the high stool in the lawyer's office will be a place of penance and the sailor's quarter-deck the lost heaven of his ambition. No doubt, by the time the soldier wrongly labelled as a parson or the sailor painfully working the legal treadmill, comes to the end of his career, the old shoe which has pinched him so long will be worn comparatively easy. The gradual decay of manly vigour, and the slow but sure destruction of strong desires, reduce one's feet at last to masses of accommodating pulp; but what suffering we go through before this result can be attained!--what years of fruitless yearning, of fierce despair, of pathetic self-suppression, of jarring discord between work and fitness, pound all the life out of us before our bones become like wax and pinching shoes are transformed to easy-fitting slippers! For itself alone, not counting the beyond to which the hope clings, it would scarcely seem that such a life were worth the living.