Loafing

When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn
has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows
who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and
stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest,
realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence
has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures
than the other -- that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart
supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes
straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been
spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others,
the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the
Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it: they
are very necessary to him. For ''Suave mari magno'' is the motto of
your true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the
struggles and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making
holiday that he is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and
maintain his self-satisfaction at boiling-point. And so is he never
very far away from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof,
but hovers more or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star
amidst whirling constellations, he may watch the mad world ''glance,
and nod, and hurry by.''

There are many such centres of contemplation along the West Coast of
Scotland. Few places are better loafing-ground than a pier, with its
tranquil ''lucid interval'' between steamers, the ever recurrent throb
of paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles,
splash of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry
and scurry of the human morrice. Here, tanquam in speculo, the Loafer
as he lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in
the great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting,
departing woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference --
he may experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a
dream; as if, indeed, he were Heine's god in dream on a mountain-side.
Let the drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his
dream, will vanish into the nothing whence they came. And these
emotions may be renewed each morning; if a fair one sail to-day, be
sure that one as fair will land to-morrow. The supply is
inexhaustible.

But in the South perhaps the happiest loafing-ground is the gift of
Father Thames; for there again the contrast of violent action, with
its blisters, perspiration, and the