slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of
enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a
day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look
anything but comfortable.

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas,
with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native
fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the
prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the
year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did
the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather
was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit
of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most
of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a
taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon
the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another
snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of
an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I
have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted
with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.
This, during my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that it
was visible in all the lines of my countenance. My health and my good
spirits flagged. I had perpetually a dread of some crisis, to which I
should be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, I served over
again all night in my sleep, and would awake with terrors of imaginary
false entries, errors in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years
of age, and no prospect of emancipation presented itself. I had grown
to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.