A Rocky Mountain locomotive engineer told us that at certain places they change locomotives and let the machine rest, as a locomotive always kept in full heat soon got out of order. Our advice to all overworked good people is, "Slow up!" Slacken your speed as you come to the crossings. All your faculties for work at this rate will be consumed. You are on fire now—see the premonitory smoke. A hot axle!
Some of our young people have read till they are crazed of learned blacksmiths who at the forge conquered thirty languages, and of shoemakers who, pounding sole-leather, got to be philosophers, and of milliners who, while their customers were at the glass trying on their spring hats, wrote a volume of first-rate poems. The fact is no blacksmith ought to be troubled with more than five languages; and instead of shoemakers becoming philosophers, we would like to turn our surplus of philosophers into shoemakers; and the supply of poetry is so much greater than the demand that we wish milliners would stick to their business. Extraordinary examples of work and endurance may do as much harm as good. Because Napoleon slept only three hours a night, hundreds of students have tried the experiment; but instead of Austerlitz and Saragossa, there came of it only a sick headache and a botch of a recitation. We are told of how many books a man can read in the five spare minutes before breakfast, and the ten minutes at noon, but I wish some one could tell us how much rest a man can get in fifteen minutes after dinner, or how much health in an hour's horseback ride, or how much fun in a Saturday afternoon of cricket. He who has such an idea of the value of time that he takes none of it for rest wastes all his time.
Most Americans do not take time for sufficient sleep. We account for our own extraordinary health by the fact that we are fanatics on the subject of sleep. We differ from our friend Napoleon Bonaparte in one respect: we want nine hours' sleep, and we take it—eight hours at night and one hour in the day. If we miss our allowance one week, as we often do, we make it up the next week or the next month. We have sometimes been twenty-one hours in arrearages. We formerly kept a memorandum of the hours for sleep lost. We pursued those hours till we caught them. If at the beginning of our summer vacation we are many hours behind in slumber, we go down to the sea-shore or among the mountains and sleep a month. If the world abuses us at any time, we go and take an extra sleep; and when we wake up, all the world is smiling on us. If we come to a knotty point in our discourse, we take a sleep; and when we open our eyes, the opaque has become transparent. We split every day in two by a nap in the afternoon. Going to take that somniferous interstice, we say to the servants, "Do not call me for anything. If the house takes fire, first get the children out and my private papers; and when the roof begins to fall in call me." Through such fanaticism we have thus far escaped the hot axle.
Somebody ought to be congratulated—I do not know who, and so I will shake hands all around—on the fact that the health of the country seems improving. Whether Dio Lewis, with his gymnastic clubs, has pounded to death American sickness, or whether the coming here of many English ladies with their magnificent pedestrian habits, or whether the medicines in the apothecary shops through much adulteration have lost their force, or whether the multiplication of bathtubs has induced to cleanliness people who were never washed but once, and that just after their arrival on this planet, I cannot say. But sure I am that I never saw so many bright, healthy-faced people as of late.
Our maidens have lost the languor they once cultivated, and walk the street with stout step, and swing the croquet mallet with a force that sends the ball through two arches, cracking the opposing ball with great emphasis. Our daughters are not ashamed to culture flower beds, and while they plant the rose in the ground a corresponding rose blooms in their own cheek.
But we need another proclamation of emancipation. The human locomotive goes too fast. Cylinder, driving-boxes, rock-shaft, truck and valve-gear need to "slow up." Oh! that some strong hand would unloose the burdens from our over-tasked American life, that there might be fewer bent shoulders, and pale cheeks, and exhausted lungs, and quenched eyes, the law, and medicine, and theology less frequently stopped in their glorious progress, because of the hot axle!
CHAPTER IX.
BEEFSTEAK FOR MINISTERS.
There have been lately several elaborate articles remarking upon what they call the lack of force and fire in the clergy. The world wonders that, with such a rousing theme as the gospel, and with such a grand work as saving souls, the ministry should ever be nerveless. Some ascribe it to lack of piety, and some to timidity of temperament. We believe that in a great number of cases it is from the lack of nourishing food. Many of the clerical brotherhood are on low diet. After jackets and sacks have been provided for the eight or ten children of the parsonage, the father and mother must watch the table with severest economy. Coming in suddenly upon the dinner-hour of the country clergyman, the housewife apologizes for what she calls "a picked-up" dinner, when, alas! it is nearly always picked up.