your cambric and fine linen against the stones, shattering a button,
fraying a hem, or rending a seam at every stroke, feels a triumphant
contempt for the miserable creature whose plodding needle and thread
put the garment together. This feeling is the germ from which the
Dhobie has grown. Day after day he has stood before that great black
stone and wreaked his rage upon shirt and trowser and coat, and coat
and trowser and shirt. Then he has wrung them as if he were wringing
the necks of poultry, and fixed them on his drying line with thorns
and spikes, and finally he has taken the battered garments to his
torture chamber and ploughed them with his iron, longwise and
crosswise and slantwise, and dropped glowing cinders on their
tenderest places. Son has followed father through countless
generations in cultivating this passion for destruction, until it has
become the monstrous growth which we see and shudder at in the
Dhobie.

But I find in him, at least, an illustration of another human
infirmity. He takes in hand to eradicate the dirt which defiles the
garment. But the one is closely mingled with the very fibres of the
other, the one is impalpable, the other bulky and substantial, and so
the torrent of his zealous rage unconsciously turns against the very
substance of that which he set himself lovingly to purge and restore
to its primitive purity. Indeed, I sometimes find that, while he has
successfully wrecked the garment, he has overlooked the dirt!
Greater and better men than the Dhobie are employed in the same way.

Such are the consolations of philosophy,


"But there was never yet philosopher