the paralysis of dream-life, when you cannot stir, and yet feel the breath of the unseen terror behind you. Now, day-dreaming is free from these possibilities: you sit apart, and let the thinking apparatus play, like a fountain, by itself. You don't tax or catechise it, you turn the peg and see what it will do. You have no more idea of what is coming than your shoe has. You watch with something like the interest an old bird on a bough might feel in the frolics of its full-feathered young, and yet you can recall the whole brood with a "cluck."

Now, I mean to say that this day-dreaming is sometimes desirable and healthy. We thus occasionally come across thoughts which we should never start by deliberate hunting. We air the mind; we get out of the little world in which we commonly move, and go back to it refreshed.

Day-dreaming is all very well, now and then, on a holiday; but a woman who gushes with moonshine and romance is seldom a good judge of butcher's meat, or a skilful interpreter of accounts; and a man who aspires at an angel deserves to dine off stringy mutton and underdone potatoes, on cold plates, for the rest of his life.

Young man, think twice before you commit yourself to the romantic young lady, whose impulsive ideal of faithfulness and devotion will never enable her to protect you from short weight, domestic pilferings, and frayed, buttonless linen.

( 206 )

ASSOCIATION.

ERHAPS

no subject offers more

metaphysical difficulties, and at the

same time finds more incessant illustration in the commonest, most thoughtless life, than that of Association. Association is the belt of the world-it embraces heaven and earth, God and man; life and death are contained within its bounds. It is the mystery of the past, the present, and the future.

After a glimpse, we must be touched with a sense of its immensity; we may therefore more freely handle a few little tags in the fringe which borders it. Some subjects may well dismay us, for they appear to be within compass, and to expect an exhaustive examination, if they are examined at all; others are so large that the philosopher can really make little more impression upon them than the fool, and it is no more pretentious in the one than in the other to approach them. Here we are, then, by the brink of the great sea of

The Groom and the Eggs.

207

Association, without horizon, sounding, or end; let us dip our little mug in and sip upon the

beach.

Events widely severed are joined and meet together in some familiar scene. Take, for instance, the story of the groom and the eggs. A gentleman was driving, on driving, on a moonlight night in September, over a bridge, in a onehorse phaeton. He wore a white coat, and his servant sat behind him. Just beyond the bridge, on the right, was a windmill, and on the left, a church. The clock struck eleven. The gentleman turning round suddenly to the groom, said: "John, do you like eggs?" 'Yes, sir," said John, touching his hat.

Exactly twelve months afterwards, he was driving the same vehicle over the same bridge at eleven o'clock by moonlight, in a white coat. The clock struck. The gentleman turned round suddenly to the groom, and said: "How?" "Poached, sir," replied John, touching his hat.

The eye and the ear annihilate space and time. An unexpected familiar sound transports us in a moment. When we hear the whetting of a scythe, there is a vision of the hayfield, the harvest, or the lawn. If we were to hear it in Piccadilly, we should still see cabs

and granite with the outward eye, but swaths of grass or bending barley would be immediately present to the true or inward seeing

power.

A passer-by says, "Tlck," and horses come into the field of vision. The hiss of the groom recalls the stable-door, the bucket, the sponge, and ammonia. The bleat of the lamb carries us another way. The tom-tom of the Hindu beggar strikes the contrast between the East and the West. The peal from the steeple rekindles a mixed memory of weddings, victories, and elections.

There are, of course, catholic sounds which suggest the same ideas to different minds with approximate certainty. The passing bell has one message to all. But each associates some private scene with some particular sight, or sound, or smell.

I can never see a knife laid with its edge upwards without thinking of a particular picnic. There was a pause, and I suppose a moment of unusual receptivity in my brain; we talked about accidents in carving, danger of carelessness with knives, &c., when a gentleman, with much ceremony, set the large carving-knife in the middle of the group with its edge uppermost, and while we expected