down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean,
and really want, and really intend to do with their lives. And this, I
may observe, is a beneficial process wholly impossible on 100 pounds a
year divided by eight.

But I wonder whether they will be thin-skinned enough ever to discover
that other and less delightful side of life only seen by those who have
plenty of leisure. Sordid cares may be very terrible to the sensitive,
and make them miss the best of everything, but as long as they have them
and are busy from morning till night keeping up appearances, they miss
also the burden of those fears, and dreads, and realisations that beset
him who has time to think. When in the morning I go into my sausage-room
and give out sausages, I never think of anything but sausages. My
horizon is bounded by them, every faculty is absorbed by them, and they
engross me, while I am with them, to the exclusion of the whole world.
Not that I love them; as far as that goes, unlike the effect they
produce on most of my country-men, they leave me singularly cold; but it
is one of my duties to begin the day with sausages, and every morning
for the short time I am in the midst of their shining rows, watching my
_Mamsell_ dexterously hooking down the sleekest with an instrument like
a boat-hook, I am practically dead to every other consideration in
heaven or on earth. What are they to me, Love, Life, Death, all the
mysteries? The one thing that concerns me is the due distribution to the
servants of sausages; and until that is done, all obstinate questionings
and blank misgivings must wait. If I were to spend my days in their
entirety doing such work I should never have time to think, and if I
never thought I should never feel, and if I never felt I should never
suffer or rapturously enjoy, and so I should grow to be something very
like a sausage myself, and not on that account, I do believe, any the
less precious to the Man of Wrath.