length the spider finishes the deadly process. Do you feel the threads of some evil habit clinging about the limbs of your soul? Struggle to be free. Determine that you will not be a slave, but a man. CHAPTER XII. ROUGHING IT, OR SIMPLICITY OF LIFE. It is amusing to hear what some people mean by roughing it. If they go out for a holiday and stay at a few places devoid of couches and easy-chairs, and where the dinner service is somewhat defective, they come back as though they had been the heroes of a very hard campaign. In fact, the cutting off for a while of any luxury, however trivial, is regarded as a great hardship by some. Our notions of severity depend on our notions of ease. There are very few who are called upon to rough it all through life. The sailor has a hard time at sea; the soldier has to put up with many privations while out on a campaign; and many men at the commencement of their course have hard work to make both ends meet. When this hardness is presented to us in the form of duty, it serves to strengthen the character. So too, when young men take a holiday amid beautiful scenery at a small outlay, they come back not only invigorated in health, but with a new and higher tone to the mind. It is an advantage to young people voluntarily to rough it occasionally. But the method which finds a special manifestation at some periods, and which has this special name of "roughing it" attached to it, may be usefully applied to all the circumstances of life. Society would be much more healthy, and its members would be happier, if modern habits were less artificial and expensive. Very many spoil their social joys by living in houses larger than they can afford to keep up. A smaller house would mean lower rent and taxes, and less expense in every way. Suburban life is often a snobbish struggle to keep up appearances. Simplicity, on the other hand, means reality. It means the conformation of our expenditure to our income, and the due proportion between the higher and lower wants of our nature. If a man lives within his income and yet spends nothing on books, magazines, lectures, music, and art, I do not call him a man of simple habits. He may be a glutton, or a sensualist, or a miser; but as there is no sense. of proportion in his habits, he is no model to be imitated. |