“How strange this is!” cried William; “What can be the reason of it?”
“It is,” replied his father, “a striking instance of the power of habit over the body. The cold is so intense on the top of these mountains, that it is as much as travellers can do to keep themselves from being frozen to death. Their bodies, therefore, become so habituated to the sensation of cold, that every diminution of it as they descend seems to them a degree of actual heat; and when they are got halfway down, they feel as if they were quite in a sultry climate. On the other hand the valleys at the foot of the mountains are so excessively hot, that the body becomes relaxed, and sensible to the slightest degree of cold; so that when a traveller ascends from them toward the hills, the middle regions appear quite inclement from their coldness.”
“And does the same thing,” rejoined William, “always happen in crossing high mountains?”
“It does,” returned his father, “in a degree proportioned to their height, and the time taken in crossing them. Indeed, a short time is sufficient to produce similar effects. Let one boy have been playing at rolling snowballs, and another have been roasting himself before a great fire, and let them meet in the porch of the house;—if you ask them how they feel, I will answer for it you will find them as different in their accounts as the travellers on the Andes. But this is only one example of the operation of a universal principle belonging to human nature: for the power of habit is the same thing whatever be the circumstance which calls it forth, whether relating to the mind or the body.
“You may consider the story you have been reading as a sort of simile or parable. The central station on the mountain may be compared to middle life. With what different feelings is this regarded by those who bask in the sunshine of opulence, and those who shrink under the cold blast of penury!
“Suppose the wealthy duke, our neighbour, were suddenly obliged to descend to our level, and live as we do—to part with all his carriages, sell his coach-horses, and hunters, quit his noble seat with its fine park and gardens, dismiss all his train of servants except two or three, and take a house like ours; what a dreadful fall it would seem to him! how wretched it would probably make him, and how much would he be pitied by the world!
“On the other hand, suppose the labourer who lives in the next cottage were unexpectedly to fall heir to an estate of a few hundreds a year, and in consequence to get around him all the comforts and conveniences that we possess—a commodious house to inhabit, good clothes to wear, plenty of wholesome food and firing, servants to do all the drudgery of the family and the like;—how all his acquaintance would congratulate him, and what a paradise would he seem to himself to be got into! Yet he, and the duke, and ourselves, are equally men, made liable by nature to the same desires and necessities, and perhaps all equally strong in constitution, and equally capable of supporting hardships. Is not this fully as wonderful a difference in feeling as that on crossing the Andes?”
“Indeed it is,” said William.
“And the cause of it must be exactly the same—the influence of habit.”
“I think so.”