you up a perpetual interest; and secondly, the disagreeable
duty is forever abolished. I say forever, because, when you
have gone without the button awhile, the inconvenience it
occasions will reconcile you to the necessity of sewing it
on,--will even go further, and make it a positive relief
amounting to positive pleasure. Besides, every time you use
it, for a long while after, you will have a delicious sense
of satisfaction, such as accompanies the sudden complete
cessation of a dull, continuous pain. Thus what was at best
characterless routine, and most likely an exasperation, is
turned into actual delight, and adds to the sum of life. This
is thrift. This is economy. But, alas! few people understand
the art of living. They strive after system, wholeness,
buttons, and neglect the weightier matters of the higher law.

--I wonder how I got here, or how I am to get back again. I
started for Fontdale, and I find myself in a mending-basket.
As I know no good in tracing the same road back, we may as well
strike a bee-line and begin new at Fontdale.

We stopped at Fontdale a-cousining. I have a veil, a
beautiful--HAVE, did I say? Alas! Troy WAS. But I must not
anticipate--a beautiful veil of brown tissue, none of your
woolleny, gruff fabrics, fit only for penance, but a silken,
gossamery cloud, soft as a baby's cheek. Yet everybody fleers
at it. Everybody has a joke about it. Everybody looks at it,
and holds it out at arms' length, and shakes it, and makes
great eyes at it, and says, "What in the world--" and ends with
a huge, bouncing laugh. Why? One is ashamed of human nature
at being forced to confess. Because, to use a Gulliverism,