The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are
building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the
Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
laugh no longer - and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest
men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for
that is only to suffer one another.
Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his
epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton
appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he
was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched
among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le
premier pas qui coute'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at
least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five
hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company
Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general
whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up
and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the
true breeding soil of Revelation.
