There is but one place for such burdens as these, and we never lay them there till we have tried everything else in vain; just as we offer the remnants of a life from which we expect no more pleasure, where we ought to have given all the promise and vigour of our youth, or take an aching, hopeless, worn-out heart back to our only friend, as the crying child runs to its parent with a broken toy
"The ox toils through the furrow,
Obedient to the goad;
The patient ass up flinty paths
Plods with its weary load,"
says Macaulay in his glorious "Lays of Ancient Rome," and something in the nature of both these animals fits them especially for the endurance of labour and the imposition of weight. It is well for a man when he has a little of the bovine repose of character, a good deal of the asinine thickness of skin and insensibility to hard usage.
