Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1876 — Decidedly Lazy. [ARTICLE]

Decidedly Lazy.

Laziness was his foible. He had that unpleasant quality in its supreme condition. The throne of indolence was vacant on our coast until Cyrus lolled forward and fell into it. He was own brother to the snail, and no relation whatever to the ant. Even his cautious father, discoursing of him one day, acknowledged that “ boy was rather-chicken-hearted about work.” Unaided locomotion was distasteful to him. If sent bn an errand tn the next cottage, he waited patiently for an opportunity to transfer himself bodily into the tail-end of somebody’s passing wagon, considering it better to be thus assisted along than to assume the responsibility of moving forward on his own legs. He spared himself all the fatigue possible to mortality, and overcame labor by constantly lying in wait for “a lift,” as he called it. He was the only sea-side stripling I ever met who eschewed fishing. Most boys are devotees of the rod and line, but Cyrus was an exception. The necessary anterior search for bait was too much for his inertia. Clam and worm might lie for. ever undisturbed, so far as he was concerned.*' - -l His dilatory habit rose sometimes to the audacity of genius. He could consume mire hours* in going a mile to the village postoffice and returning with the mail than one would credit, unless his gait came under personal observation, We took a kind of exasperated delight as we used to watch him trailing along the ground, and we felt a fresh wonder every day at his power of slow procedure. It seemed a gift, an endowment, now for the first time’vouchsafed to mortal inertneed. The caterpillar would have been too rapid for him; he would lose in a race with that dull groundling. He seemed to he counting myriads or some 4 thingitithe road. When he cautiously and •laboriously lifted up one foot, it seemed an eternity before the other followed it. He would frequently drop getting over a stone wall, and Jiis .recumbent figure was imprinted under all the'frees by the road-side.—“ A Peculiar Case," in Scribner for December.