"Come, laddie," I said to my comrade, "let us go home. You and I are very rich. We own the mountains. But we can never sell them, and we don't want to."
A LAZY, IDLE BROOK
"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only
to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is
the most important thing he has to do."
—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: An Apology for Idlers.
I. A CASUAL INTRODUCTION
On the South Shore of Long Island, all things incline to a natural somnolence. There are no ambitious mountains, no braggart cliffs, no hasty torrents, no hustling waterfalls in that land,
"In which it seemeth always afternoon."
The salt meadows sleep in the summer sun; the farms and market-gardens yield a placid harvest to a race of singularly unhurried tillers of the soil; the low hills rise with gentle slopes, not caring to get too high in the world, only far enough to catch a pleasant glimpse of the sea and a breath of fresh air; the very trees grow leisurely, as if they felt that they had "all the time there is." And from this dreamy land, close as it lies to the unresting ocean, the tumult of the breakers and the foam of ever-turning tides are shut off by the languid lagoons of the Great South Bay and a long range of dunes, crested with wire-grass, bay-bushes, and wild-roses.
In such a country you could not expect a little brook to be noisy, fussy, energetic. If it were not lazy, it would be out of keeping.