Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1877 — A Tramp’s View of Idleness. [ARTICLE]

A Tramp’s View of Idleness.

He came msmwiy and laboriously, as if five tons of weariness were weighing down hit spirits. He dropped heavily into a chair, sighed several four-foot sighs, and then bombarded us with the following conundrum: “ What is idleness ? What does it coi> sistof?” “Don’t know. Never experienced it. ” “ Now, some people would call doing nothing idleness, wouldn’t they T” “ I suppose they would.” j “' r es; .and that’s where some people make a mistake. There is no such thing as idleness. No man is ever wholly idle; if his body isn’t busy his brain is. I know that if a man sits around and shows a dls l inclination to work, folks will call him a tramp and a ‘cucumber of the ground,’ as Shakspeare says; but it don’t make any difference. .It isn’t so, and I can produce plenty of proof to sustain the position I take in the matter. Now, for instance, who ever heard of Napoleon getting up at five o’clock in the morning and starting outto the field with a hoe ever his shoulder, or chasing a side-hill plow around a field fourteen hours a day? Did Napoleon ever do that?” - “Never heard that he did.” “ No, sir ; he labored with his intellect, and when he had any real work to per form, thousands of men were ready to do < ' ■ . .... ..

bis bidding. That’s the sort of a man Napoleon was. He never sawed a cord of wood or did a hard day’s work in his life; and yet he was never arrested for vagrancy. and no interfering policeman ever came nosing around and told him to move along or the hand of the law would snatch him to the jug. “ Then look at Diogenes! What sort of a man was be ? On the unbalanced ledger of history do we find on the credit side any entry of this kind: "tDlogen**. Cr. *• B> one day'e work ~. sl.oo’ “ Nothing of the sort. Diogenes was a man who took the world easy. The* only tiling he ever did that we have any record of was .roaming around the streets of Syracuse with an old tin lantern in his hand. He pretended to be looking for an honest man. More likely be was mapping out a free-lunch route. So much for Diogenes. “Now turn over another page and glance at the portrait of Sir Isaac Newton. Wasn’t he a thoroughbred tramp ? All he did was to sit out in his garden under an apple-tree, smoke his old clay pipe, and build castles ia the air. One day an apple fell off the tree and struck Sir Isaac square in the eye. The circumstance made him famous. Why ? Because he was a genuine, philosophical tramp, and took things coolly. When the apple hit him he didn’t get mad and throw three cornered Greek words around through the atmosphere, or anything of that sort. He simply picked the apple up, looked it over carefully for worm-holes, and slipped it in his pocket to eat after supper. Then he began to wonder why the apnle didn’t go up instead of falling down to the ground. You see, before that he had never paid any attention to the matter, and he didn’t know whether it was the usual and correct thing for fruit to fly oil at a tangent from the earth when it became detached from the tree, or to come down, like Col. Crockett’s coon. He determined to investigate. So he hired a small boy to climb the tree and shake, and he watched till every apple fell to the ground. None of them flew up. Sir Isaac was satisfied. He had made a great discovery. The next day he cut out a basswood model of an apple-tree with a half grown pippin just in the act of starting on a voyage to the earth, and sent it on to Washington and had his discovery patented. This made Sir Isaac a noted man. When a little thing like that lifts a man up and plants him on the pinnacle of fame isn’t it an encouragement tor us all to sit around and wait to be hit by something? If 1 wanted to, I could go and work for a railroad at thirty-five cents a day, and board myself, but I won’t do it. I’ll hang around and wait for an opportunity. My intellect will have a chance to show itself some time; and if you hear of anybody waking up and startling the world within the next fifteen or twenty years, you’ll know it’s me. Ta, ta.” And the weary man arose and slowly glided forth—never, we hope, to return. — Puck.