fact, being the foremost passion of the human
mind, so that when we cannot be distinguished
for wit, beauty, wealth, or renown, we grasp
even at the pitiful decoration of monstrous
disease—that being better than the dead level of
an undistinguishable likeness with the vulgar
crowd.

Another hobby of a kind akin is our own
woeful sorrow. Heaven help us! we have all
of us material enough to make that hobby from
mane to tail, if we have a mind, though we may
not all desire such public riding as what some
of us delight in. The black housings of death,
the tattered ones of poverty, the tear-laden of
disappointment, the flame-coloured of domestic
strife, the crushed and crumpled of oppression
and injustice,—who is without one or other,
and some with all at once, and more to the
back of them—shut up in the closet with the
skeleton, and able to be made into the
trappings for a hobby at a moment's notice, if so
willing? Women are, for the most part, the
riders of this hobby—men not often breaking
down the home fence to show off the family
skeleton in the court-yard, pranked out as a
hobby, and ridden about the roads for the whole
outside world to see. But women, to whom
concealment is a thing abhorrent from Fatima's
time and before, build up a hobby out of the
dry bones; and when they do so, they are
second in unpleasantness only to those who
dandle their diseases like pet dolls, and drag you
through a pathological museum every time you
spend half an hour in their company. For
sorrows make up the pathology of the soul;
and suffering is a disease, whether of the mind
or the body.

Another hobby capers about with a pill-box
at the saddle-bow and black draughts in the
holsters, where the pistols of fighting men should
be. Fortunately for mankind, many of this sort
(also generally women) have of late years taken
to Hahnemann and infinitesimals, so that they
are not likely to do the amount of grave mischief
common in the days when men and women were
prescribed for like horses, and little children
underwent the treatment which would now be
considered too severe for a Life Guardsman.
Else, if not homœopathic, they are great patrons
of patented medicines, and have always some
wonderful salve or pill on hand, able to heal all
sores and to cure all disorders. This is a useful
hobby enough if held with a tight rein and
given but scanty housings; also if pastured
among the poor, to whom a doctor's bill would
be destruction, and self-management worse
destruction still  else, if suffered to go caracolling
about unchecked, and with a generous profusion
of silver trappings, it is one of the runaway
nuisances of the hobby genus to be caught hold
of and tethered in the pound the soonest and
most rigorous possible.

Akin to this, in a far away sense, is that
provoking creation which goes about the world
putting things to rights. Some people think that
they have a mission to set their neighbours'
houses straight; that they were born to sweep
souls clean with their own moral brooms; and
that whatever they think to be good and wise—
what special Numbo Jumbo they vow to be
Apollo and Jove in one, is so absolutely, let
who will hold opinions diverging. These are
the people who, while hotly combating for
truth and its righteous absolutism, change their
creed twenty times in their lives, yet who are
passionate and perhaps intolerant proselytisers
for each and all in turn, learning nothing by
experience, and learning self-diffidence least of all;
yet so passionate and so intolerant that they will
denounce the wilful blindness of even their own
former disciples, who have remained faithful to the
special hobby to whose tail they were the means
of attaching them. These are the people who
take up every superstition and every delusion as
it appears, and who always go beyond their
master, out-Heroding Herod, more Lutheran than
Luther, and Calvinistic beyond Calvin; they
form the pabulum on which each new craze feeds,
and change their hobbies as often as new
delusions arise. But they keep faithful to one—their
hobby in chief, and the bell-wether of the rest
—namely, reforming and converting every
miserable individual for ill luck fallen within their
sphere; attempting to clothe all in the special
livery adopted at the moment, and signing them
to the creed which is to be the regeneration of
the world. They are a well-meaning set, these
hobby-riders; but truth, if not politeness,
compels me to assign them to the region of illimitable
bores; and were I compelled to make a
choice—from which the kind fates defend me!
—I would rather accept the quack medicines
than the quack faiths, and would prefer to
swallow strange pills by the hundred than new
faiths by the score. The riders of the hobby
ticketed Moral Physic, have had a fine field in
that Salt Lake city we have all heard something
about; also in certain other cities nearer
home, where the banner of new lights has been
unfurled for crazy fools to gather under its
folds.

A hobby-horse made after the pattern of a
will-o'-the-wisp, jumping here and there and
everywhere, capering up and down over every
kind of pasture, even over places usually held
sacred, and sometimes running down hill with
the bit between his teeth masterless, is the
hobby-horse of the punster. I know a man with
whom the habit is so inveterate, the hobby so
domesticated, that he would pun at the funeral
of his own mother, and find occasions for flashes
of wit on the most sorrowful event of his or any
other person's life. It is not that he is heartless
—on the contrary, he is a warm-hearted,
genial fellow—but that he has ridden his hobby
for so long he cannot dismount now; hobbies
having a certain power of adhesion when one
has been long inside the housings. It is an
irritating kind of hobby, and plagues one as
much as the buzzing of a fly, or the shrill piping
of a gnat, or anything else that is restless,
purposeless, and intrusive. For the punning hobby
is never still. Go where you will, or do what
you will—chant psalms, sob threnodies, make