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DAYS OFF

And Other Digressions

by

HENRY VAN <DW18>







[Illustration: Our canoes go with the river, but no longer easily or
lazily.]



I do not count the hours I spend
In wandering by the sea;
The forest is my loyal friend,
Like God it useth me:

Or on the mountain-crest sublime,
Or down the oaken glade,
O what have I to do with Time?
For this the day was made.

                    --RALPH WALDO EMERSON



Illustrated

New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
MDCCCCVII

Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons

Printed in October, 1907
Reprinted in November, 1907
Reprinted in December, 1907




                                  To
                       MY FRIEND AND NEIGHBOUR
                           GROVER CLEVELAND
                      WHOSE YEARS OF GREAT WORK
                            AS A STATESMAN
                HAVE BEEN CHEERED BY DAYS OF GOOD PLAY
                            AS A FISHERMAN
                        THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
                      WITH WARM AND DEEP REGARDS

Avalon,
July 10th, 1907.




CONTENTS


   I. _Days Off_                                                  1

  II. _A Holiday in a Vacation_                                  23

 III. _His Other Engagement_                                     57

  IV. _Books that I Loved as a Boy_                             101

   V. _Among the Quantock Hills_                                117

  VI. _Between the Lupin and the Laurel_                        139

 VII. _Little Red Tom_                                          177

VIII. _Silverhorns_                                             193

  IX. _Notions about Novels_                                    221

   X. _Some Remarks on Gulls_                                   233

  XI. _Leviathan_                                               271

 XII. _The Art of Leaving Off_                                  309




ILLUSTRATIONS


_Our canoes go with the river, but no longer easily
or lazily_                                             Frontispiece

                                                        Facing page

_On such a carry travel is slow_                                 36

_A notion to go down stream struck the salmon_                   88

_There was the gleam of an immense mass of silver in
its meshes_                                                      94

_Tannery Combe, Holford_                                        126

"_Billy began to call, and it was beautiful_"                   206

_There he stood defiant, front feet planted wide apart_         218

_She took the oars and rowed me slowly around the shore_        266




DAYS OFF


"A day off" said my Uncle Peter, settling down in his chair before the
open wood-fire, with that air of complacent obstinacy which spreads
over him when he is about to confess and expound his philosophy of
life,--"a day off is a day that a man takes to himself."

"You mean a day of luxurious solitude," I said, "a stolen sweet of
time, which he carries away into some hidden corner to enjoy alone,--a
little-Jack-Horner kind of a day?"

"Not at all," said my Uncle Peter; "solitude is a thing which a man
hardly ever enjoys by himself. He may practise it from a sense of duty.
Or he may take refuge in it from other things that are less tolerable.
But nine times out of ten he will find that he can't get a really good
day to himself unless he shares it with some one else; if he takes it
alone, it will be a heavy day, a chain-and-ball day,--anything but a
day off."

"Just what do you mean, then?" I asked, knowing that nothing would
please him better than the chance to discover his own meaning against a
little background of apparent misunderstanding and opposition.

"I mean," said my Uncle Peter, in that deliberate manner which lends a
flavour of deep wisdom to the most obvious remarks, "I mean that every
man owes it to himself to have some days in his life when he escapes
from bondage, gets away from routine, and does something which seems to
have no purpose in the world, just because he wants to do it."

"Plays truant," I interjected.

"Yes, if you like to put it in that objectionable way," he answered;
"but I should rather compare it to bringing flowers into the
school-room, or keeping white mice in your desk, or inventing a new
game for the recess. You see we are all scholars, boarding scholars, in
the House of Life, from the moment when birth matriculates us to the
moment when death graduates us. We never really leave the big school,
no matter what we do. But my point is this: the lessons that we learn
when we do not know that we are studying are often the pleasantest, and
not always the least important. There is a benefit as well as a joy in
finding out that you can lay down your task for a proper while without
being disloyal to your duty. Play-time is a part of school-time, not a
break in it. You remember what Aristotle says: '_ascholoumetha gar hina
scholazomen_.'"

"My dear uncle," said I, "there is nothing out of the common in your
remarks, except of course your extraordinary habit of decorating them
with a Greek quotation, like an ancient coin set as a scarf-pin and
stuck carelessly into a modern neck-tie. But apart from this
eccentricity, everybody admits the propriety of what you have been
saying. Why, all the expensive, up-to-date schools are arranged on your
principle: play-hours, exercise-hours, silent-hours, social-hours, all
marked in the schedule: scholars compelled and carefully guided to
amuse themselves at set times and in approved fashions: athletics,
dramatics, school-politics and social ethics, all organized and
co-ordinated. What you flatter yourself by putting forward as an
amiable heresy has become a commonplace of orthodoxy, and your liberal
theory of education and life is now one of the marks of fashionable
conservatism."

My Uncle Peter's face assumed the beatific expression of a man who
knows that he has been completely and inexcusably misunderstood, and is
therefore justified in taking as much time as he wants to make the
subtlety and superiority of his ideas perfectly clear and to show how
dense you have been in failing to apprehend them.

"My dear boy," said he, "it is very singular that you should miss my
point so entirely. All these things that you have been saying about
your modern schools illustrate precisely the opposite view from mine.
They are signs of that idolatry of organization, of system, of the
time-table and the schedule, which is making our modern life so tedious
and exhausting. Those unfortunate school-boys and school-girls who have
their amusements planned out for them and cultivate their social
instincts according to rule, never know the joy of a real day off,
unless they do as I say, and take it to themselves. The right kind of a
school will leave room and liberty for them to do this. It will be a
miniature of what life is for all of us,--a place where law reigns and
independence is rewarded,--a stream of work and duty diversified by
islands of freedom and repose,--a pilgrimage in which it is permitted
to follow a side-path, a mountain trail, a footway through the meadow,
provided the end of the journey is not forgotten and the day's march
brings one a little nearer to that end."

"But will it do that," I asked, "unless one is careful to follow the
straight line of the highway and march as fast as one can?"

"That depends," said my Uncle Peter, nodding his head gravely, "upon
what you consider the end of the journey. If it is something entirely
outside of yourself, a certain stint of work which you were created to
perform; or if it is something altogether beyond yourself, a certain
place or office at which you are aiming to arrive; then, of course, you
must stick to the highway and hurry along.

"But suppose that the real end of your journey is something of which
you yourself are a part. Suppose it is not merely to get to a certain
place, but to get there in a certain condition, with the light of a
sane joy in your eyes and the peace of a grateful content in your
heart. Suppose it is not merely to do a certain piece of work, but to
do it in a certain spirit, cheerfully and bravely and modestly, without
overrating its importance or overlooking its necessity. Then, I fancy,
you may find that the winding foot-path among the hills often helps you
on your way as much as the high road, the day off among the islands of
repose gives you a steadier hand and a braver heart to make your voyage
along the stream of duty."

"You may skip the moralizing, if you please, Uncle Peter," said I, "and
concentrate your mind upon giving me a reasonable account of the
peculiar happiness of what you call a day off."

"Nothing could be simpler," he answered. "It is the joy of getting out
of the harness that makes a horse fling up his heels, and gallop around
the field, and roll over and over in the grass, when he is turned loose
in the pasture. It is the impulse of pure play that makes a little
bunch of wild ducks chase one another round and round on the water, and
follow their leader in circles and figures of eight; there is no
possible use in it, but it gratifies their instinct of freedom and
makes them feel that they are not mere animal automata, whatever the
natural history men may say to the contrary. It is the sense of release
that a man experiences when he unbuckles the straps of his knapsack,
and lays it down under a tree, and says 'You stay there till I come
back for you! I'm going to rest myself by climbing this hill, just
because it is not on the road-map, and because there is nothing at the
top of it except the view.'

"It is this feeling of escape," he continued, in the tone of a man who
has shaken off the harness of polite conversation and let himself go
for a gallop around the field of monologue, "it is just this
exhilarating sense of liberation that is lacking in most of our social
amusements and recreations. They are dictated by fashion and directed
by routine. Men get into the so-called 'round of pleasure,' and they
are driven into a trot to keep up with it, just as if it were a
treadmill. The only difference is that the pleasure-mill grinds no
corn. Harry Bellairs was complaining to me, the other day, that after
an exhausting season of cotillons in New York, he had been running his
motor-car through immense fatigues in France and Italy, and had
returned barely in time to do his duty by his salmon-river in Canada,
work his new boat through the annual cruise of the yacht club, finish
up a round of house-parties at Bar Harbor and Lenox, and get ready for
the partridge-shooting in England with his friend the Duke of
Bangham,--it was a dog's life, he said, and he had no time to himself
at all. I rather pitied him; he looked so frayed. It seems to me that
the best way for a man or a woman of pleasure to get a day off would be
to do a little honest work.

"You see it is the change that makes the charm of a day off. The real
joy of leisure is known only to the people who have contracted the
habit of work without becoming enslaved to the vice of overwork.

"A hobby is the best thing in the world for a man with a serious
vocation. It keeps him from getting muscle-bound in his own task. It
helps to save him from the mistake of supposing that it is his little
tick-tack that keeps the universe a-going. It leads him out, on off
days, away from his own garden corner into curious and interesting
regions of this wide and various earth, of which, after all, he is a
citizen.

"Do you happen to know the Reverend Doctor McHook? He is a learned
preacher, a devoted churchman, a faithful minister; and in addition to
this he has an extra-parochial affection for ants and spiders. He can
spend a happy day in watching the busy affairs of a formicary, and to
observe the progress of a bit of spider-web architecture gives him a
peculiar joy. There are some severe and sour-complexioned theologians
who would call this devotion to objects so far outside of his parish an
illicit passion. But to me it seems a blessing conferred by heavenly
wisdom upon a good man, and I doubt not he escapes from many an
insoluble theological puzzle, and perhaps from many an unprofitable
religious wrangle, to find refreshment and invigoration in the society
of his many-legged friends."

"You are moralizing again, Uncle Peter," I objected; "or at least you
are getting ready to do so. Stop it; and give me a working definition
of the difference between a hobby and a fad."

"Let me give you an anecdote," said he, "instead of a definition. There
was a friend of mine who went to visit a famous asylum for the insane.
Among the patients who were amusing themselves in the great hall, he
saw an old gentleman with a long white beard, who was sitting astride
of a chair, spurring its legs with his heels, holding both ends of his
handkerchief which he had knotted around the back, and crying 'Get up,
get up! G'long boy, steady!' with the utmost animation. 'You seem to be
having a fine ride, sir,' said my friend. 'Capital,' said the old
gentleman, 'this is a first-rate mount that I am riding.' 'Permit me to
inquire,' asked my friend, 'whether it is a fad or a hobby?' 'Why,
certainly!' replied the old gentleman, with a quizzical look. 'It is a
hobby, you see, for I can get off whenever I have a mind to.' And with
that he dismounted and walked into the garden.

"It is just this liberty of getting off that marks the superiority of a
hobby to a fad. The game that you feel obliged to play every day at the
same hour ceases to amuse you as soon as you realize that it is a
diurnal duty. Regular exercise is good for the muscles, but there must
be a bit of pure fun mixed with the sport that is to refresh your
heart.

"A tour in Europe, carefully mapped out with an elaborate itinerary and
a carefully connected timetable, may be full of instruction, but it
often becomes a tax upon the spirit and a weariness to the flesh.
Compulsory castles and mandatory museums and required ruins pall upon
you, as you hurry from one to another, vaguely agitated by the fear
that you may miss something that is marked with a