And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in leathern surcoats bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet weathered the Cape and sailed into halcyon seas.  For these books —­ well, you kept them many weeks before binding them, that the oleaginous printer’s-ink might fully dry before the necessary hammering; you forbore to open the pages, that the autocratic binder might refold the sheets if he pleased; and now that all is over —­ consummatum est —­ still you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a quiet mind.  For these purple emperors are not to be read in bed, nor during meals, nor on the grass with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief periods are all the whirling times allow you for solid serious reading.  Still, after all, you have them; you can at least pulverise your friends with the sight; and what have they to show against them?  Probably some miserable score or so of half-bindings, such as lead you scornfully to quote the hackneyed couplet concerning the poor Indian whose untutored mind clothes him before but leaves him bare behind.  Let us thank the gods that such things are:  that to some of us they give not poverty nor riches but a few good books in whole bindings.  Dowered with these and (if it be vouchsafed) a cup of Burgundy that is sound even if it be not old, we can leave to others the foaming grape of Eastern France that was vintaged in ’74, and with it the whole range of shilling shockers, —­ the Barmecidal feast of the purposeful novelist —­ yea, even the countless series that tell of Eminent Women and Successful Men.

Loafing

When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses.  And the wisest, realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures than the other —­ that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of reflection and appreciation.  Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart supreme.  For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others, the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them.  Far from it:  they are very necessary to him.  For ``Suave mari magno’’ is the motto of your true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the struggles and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making holiday that he is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and maintain his self-satisfaction at boiling-point.  And so is he never very far away from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof, but hovers more or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star amidst whirling constellations, he may watch the mad world ``glance, and nod, and hurry by.’’