And this suggests the fearful thought-what would the darlings do if they wore no clothes?  One-half their pleasure in walking on the street would vanish like a dream, and an equal proportion of the philosopher’s happiness in watching them would perish in the barren prospect of an inartistic nudity.  Picnicking considered as a Mistake.

Why do people attend public picnics?  We do not wish to be iterative, but why do they?  Heaven help them! it is because they know no better, and no one has had the leisure to enlighten them.

Now your picnic-goer is a muff-an egregious, gregarious muff, and a glutton.  Moreover, a nobody who, if he be male wears, in nine cases in ten, a red necktie and a linen duster to his heel; if she be female hath soiled hose to her calf, and in her face a premonition of colic to come.

We hold it morally impossible to attend a picnic and come home pure in heart and undefiled of cuticle.  For the dust will get in your nose, clog your ears, make clay in your mouth and mortar in your eyes, and so stop up all the natural passages to the soul; whereby the wickedness which that subtle organ doth constantly excrete is balked of its issue, tainting the entire system with a grievous taint.

At picnics, moreover, is engendered an unpleasant perspiration, which the patient must perforce endure until he shall bathe him in a bath.  It is not sweet to reek, and your picnicker must reek.  Should he chance to break a leg, or she a limb, the inevitable exposure of the pedal condition is alarming and eke humiliating.  Thanksgiving Day.

There be those of us whose memories, though vexed with an oyster-rake would not yield matter for gratitude, and whose piety though strained through a sieve would leave no trace of an object upon which to lavish thanks.  It is easy enough, with a waistcoat selected for the occasion, to eat one’s proportion of turkey and hide away one’s allowance of wine; and if this be returning thanks, why then gratitude is considerably easier, and vastly more agreeable, than falling off a log, and may be acquired in one easy lesson without a master.  But if more than this be required-if to be grateful means anything beyond being gluttonous, your true philosopher—­he of the severe brow upon which logic has stamped its eternal impress, and from whose heart sentiment has been banished along with other small vices-your true philosopher, say we, will think twice before he “crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee” in humble observance of the day.

For here is the nut of reason he is obliged to crack before he can obtain the kernel of emotion proper to the day.  Unless the blessings we enjoy are favours from the Omnipotent, to be grateful is to be absurd.  If they are, then, also the ills with which we are afflicted have the same origin.  Grant this, and you make an offset of the latter against the former, or are driven either to the ridiculous position that we must be equally grateful for both evils and blessings, or the no less ridiculous one that all evils are blessings in disguise.