prosaic and eternal, not at all what you expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating flash you understood what all those people were driving at when they wrote such unconscionably long letters to the Telegraph as to life being worth living or not worth living; and there was naught to be done but face the grey, monotonous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of ennui gnawing at your heart!  In a word, the moment when it occurred to you that yours is ‘the common lot.’  In that moment have you not wished—­do you not continually wish—­for an exhaustless machine, a machine that you could never get to the end of?  Would you not give your head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle, dirty, foiled, catching cold—­but absorbed in the pursuit of an object?  Have you not gloomily regretted that you were born without a mechanical turn, because there is really something about a machine...?

It has never struck you that you do possess a machine!  Oh, blind!  Oh, dull!  It has never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting!  That machine is yourself.  ‘This fellow is preaching.  I won’t have it!’ you exclaim resentfully.  Dear sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were, I think you would have it.  I think I can anyhow keep hold of your button for a while, though you pull hard.  I am not preaching.  I am simply bent on calling your attention to a fact which has perhaps wholly or partially escaped you—­namely, that you are the most fascinating bit of machinery that ever was.  You do yourself less than justice.  It is said that men are only interested in themselves.  The truth is that, as a rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves.  They have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of the planet.

A man will wake up in the middle of the night (usually owing to some form of delightful excess), and his brain will be very active indeed for a space ere he can go to sleep again.  In that candid hour, after the exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see everything in its true colours—­except himself.  There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one’s environment.  He will see all his wife’s faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them.  He will momentarily see, though with less sharpness of outline, his own faults.  He will probably decide that the anxieties of children outweigh the joys connected with children.  He