Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1892-04-28

chase of some high and noble end, even
though you catch the game you will sink
back into slothfuness before you have
roasted that which you took in hunting
Bad habits unfit man for everything but
politics.
Now, what are the results of Incidence?
A marked consequence Of this vice is physi
cal disease. The healthiness of the whole
natural world depends upon activity The
winds, tossed and driven in endless circuits,
scattering the mists from the mountains,
and scooping out death damps from the
caves, and blasting the miasma of swamps,
and hurting back the fetid atmosphere of
great cities, are healthy just because of
their swiftness and Observation-Disclosures of
sweep But, after awhile, the wind falls
and the hot sun pours through it, and
when the leaves are still and the grain
fields bend not once all day long, then pes
thence smites it's victims and digs trenches
for the dead.
The fountain, born far up in the wild
wood of the mountain. comes down
brighter for every obstacle against which
it is riven, and singing new song on
every shelf of rock over which it bounds,
till it rolls over the water wheels in the
valley, not ashamed to grind corn, and
runs through the long grass of the
meadow, where the willows reach down to
dip their branches, and the unyoked oxen
come at eventide to cool. Healthy water!
Bright water Happy waterl While some
stream, too lazy any more to run, gathers
itself into waysde pool, where the swine
wallow, and filthy insects hop over the sur
face, and reptiles crawl among the ooze,
and frogs utter their hideous croak. and by
day and night there rises from the foul
III ind
death There is an endless activity under
foot and overhead
Not one four o'clock in the flower bed,
not one ~ on the window pane, not one
squirrel gathering food from the cones of
the white pine not one rabbit feeding on
clover tops, not one drop falling in a show
en- not one minnow glancing in the sea,
not one quail whistling from the grass, not
one hawk cawing in the sky but is busy
now and is busy always, fulfilling its mis-
sion as certainly as any monarch on earth
or any angel in heaven. You hear the
shout of the powboys busy in the field
and the rattle of the whtfietrees on the
harrow, but you do not know that there is
more industry in the earth upturned and
in the dumb vegetation underfoot than in
all that you see
NATURES CEASELESS ACTIVITY.
sod you may hear nothing in the roots and
| spiculB of grass, but there are at work
| spades aud cleavers and piledrivers and
battering rams and internecine wars. do
not wonder that the lively fancy of the an
clients saw in the inanimate creation
! around Floras and Pononas and Graces
and Fauns and Fairies and Satyrs and
Nymphs. Everything is busy. Nothing
is inanimate, except the man who cannot
see the life and hear the music AT the
creation the morning stars sang together
but they were only the choir which was to
| lead all the stars, and all the mountains
and all the seas in Gods worship. All
| natural objects seem at one and the same
! tile uniting in work and JOY and worship
| In Gods creation there is no pause in either
| the worship, or the work, the joy
Amid all natural objects at one and the
same time it is Halloween and Whit
sunday and Ash Wednesday and All
Saints Day
All the healthy beauty of that which we
see and hear in the natural world is de-
pendent upon activity and unrest. Men
will be healthy-intellectua morally
and physically only upon the condition of
an active industry | know men die every
day of overwork. They drop down in coal
pits, and among the spindles of northern
factories, and on the cotton plantations of
the south. In every city and town and VII
lage you find men grooming under buSs cns
as, in the east, the camels stagger under
their loads between Aleppo and Damascus.
Life is crushed out every day at counters
and work benches and anvilS. But there
are other multitudes who die from mere
inertia. Indulgences every day are CON
tracing diseases beyond the catholicon of
Hlopathy and homeopathy and hydropathy
and cclecticism. Rather than work they
rush upon lancets and scalpels.
Nature has provided for those who vio-
.ate her laws by inactivity-whut rheum
Tor the eyes and what govt for the feet,
aud what curvature for the spinc and
what structures for the chest, and what tll-
bercles for the lungs, and what rheuma-
tisms for the muscles and what neural
gias for the nerves. Nature in time ar
raigns every such ulprit at her bar, and
| presents against him an indictment of one
hundred counts, and convicts him on each
one of them. The laws Of nature will not
stop their action because men may be il
norant of them. Disease, when it comes
to do its work, does not ask whether you
understand hygiene or pathology OF mu-
terra mediCa.
If there We're not so many lies written on
tombstones and in obituaries you would
see what multitudes of the worlds inhab-
itants are slain in their attempts to escape
the necessity of toll. Men cross oceans
and continents, and climb the Alps, and SIT
under the sky of Italy or the shadow OF
Egyptian Pyramid, and 90 down into an
Gent ruins, and battle at Baden Baden, and
come home with the same shortness OF
breath, and the same poor digestion, and
the same twitching of the nerves. when at
home with their own spade they might
have dug health ont of the ground, on
with their own AK hewn health out of q
log, or with their own scythe garnered
health from the grain field.
There are many who estimate the re
spectability of an occupation by the little
exertion it demands, and would not have
their children enter any employment where
their hands many be soiled, forgetting that
a laborer's overalls are just as honorable
AS priests robes and all anvil is just a.
respectable as II pulpit. Health flies from
the bed of down and says, Il cannot sleeI
here" and from the table spread with
Dturmi4au and epicureau yiaudS saving