finally turns aside into the Park to rest. But
his labours are not over yet, nor anything like
over. One would have thought that the region
from which he has just escaped would have been
large enough to have held all the millionnaires
in London. But there remain the vast domains
of Belgravia, Kensington Gore, South Kensington,
Palace Gardens, where people buy houses
at the rate of ten, fifteen, twenty, thousand
pounds apiece, and more.

Nor is even this all. Outside and beyond
these districts of extremest luxury and fashion,
what numbers of villas are there all round about
the outskirts of London, whose inhabitants are
people of fortune? In eastern and unfashionable
regions, as at Hackney or Clapton, in St.
John's Wood, round about Clapham or Wandsworth,
and by the banks of the river, how many
houses are there which speak in plain and easily
understood terms of the wealth of their
proprietors! It is bewildering. Who are all these
people? Where does all this money come from?
How is it done?

Not unfrequently, by means of such extreme
exertion, and such excessive straining of the
faculties, as I have already spoken of. It is in the
desire to live in such splendour and luxury, that
men strive to get out of themselves
something more than is in them. This desire
lies at the root of much of that nervous
suffering which is one of the special miseries
of the day.

Unquestionably it is the luxury of the day
which in a great degree brings all this about.
There are other indications of what our
present-day life is like, which may be noted by
the observant in their rambles about the
metropolis. The shops—what sort of tale
do they tell? How many of them, in our leading
thoroughfares, minister to our wants, and
how many to our fancies? The number of
luxury-shops in our streets is ever on the increase.
In Oxford-street, Regent-street, Bond-street,
Piccadilly, St. James's-street, how many of them!
How many jewellers, how many scent-shops,
how many for the retailing of artificial flowers,
furs, and what are called fancy articles, such as
highly decorated paper-cases, ink-stands,
paperweights, and the like? Nor must we forget that
the windows of many of the shops which sell
necessaries— the clothes we put on, for instance
—are carefully fitted with such articles of
wearing apparel as are altogether useless. It is
wonderful how all the shops where nothing
is sold but what we can perfectly well do without,
prosper and flourish. Where do all the
people by whom they are supported come from
—and the money?

Alas! would it not be better— this is what
you say, sir—if we were satisfied with a less
number of revolutions of the mental machinery
to the minute—satisfied even though the
concession should lead to such terrible results
as the giving of a dinner without kromeskis, or
going out to make merry with our friends in a
cab from round the corner?

Ah, my dear father, it is no use asking whether
it would be better or not. The times are altered,
and there is no going back possible.

Let us come to a new question, one on which
I have often heard you hold forth. Is not life
rendered both more difficult and more expensive
than it used to be, by reason of the hours we keep?
It is more difficult and more expensive to provide
two dinners a day, for example, than one.
Yet two dinners a day are wanted now. A man
who breakfasts at nine, and dines at eight, must
have a substantial meal of some kind at half-past
one or two o'clock, or else he must fall into a
state of extreme exhaustion as the afternoon
advances. The biscuit and glass of wine which
used to suffice for a luncheon when dinner was
eaten at six, or half-past six o'clock, has
become altogether inadequate. Yet must that
biscuit and glass of wine have been a prodigiously
convenient kind of snack. I speak from
tradition only, but I see its advantages. It could
be consumed parenthetically, if the expression
may be allowed. There was no fixed hour when
it must be eaten. It was not a sitting down
affair, involving preparation and punctuality,
tablecloths, and knives and forks, maybe even
a pharisaical hand-washing. It was inexpensive,
and, finally, its effects were not demoralising.
But, how demoralising is a substantial
luncheon! What an interruption it is—what a
break in the day's proceedings!

From such mid-day meal, a man comes back
to work in a state the reverse of intellectual.
A heavy meal in the middle of the day disposes
a human being to trifling, to absence of mind,
to sleepiness, and humming. It may be that
for the natural man, eating in the early afternoon
is good and wholesome. It is perhaps an
arrangement which is conducive to the body's
health—though even that I doubt—but of this
I am sure, that to us, living as we do, not
altogether in a state of nature, the practice brings
not advantage but the reverse, and that if even
it were for the good of the body, the mind
would be likely to receive injury, the flesh
overwhelming and weighing it down in
consequence of dangerous over-pampering at
unseemly hours.

Because, then, of its being a great
interruption, and because of the unsatisfactory
results that follow it, the mid-day meal is
very frequently neglected by men who have
anything to do in the world. It is a bore, the
arrangements connected with it are troublesome
and disturbing, and so we let it alone. We fall
back, perhaps, on the biscuit and glass of wine,
which, though enough under the old régime,
are now miserably inefficient; or, perhaps, finding
that there is afternoon tea going on when we
get home, we desperately drink a cup of that
beverage, and more desperately eat a slab of
deadly cake. We do so to keep nature from
giving in altogether, and a terrible mistake we
make. To swallow a cup of tea at a moment of
such exhaustion, is to take something that
stimulates and does not nourish. It has a
raking and a tearing effect upon the stomach.
It tightens all our constitutional strings to