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LUXURY AFTER STARVATION.
239
and wine in abundance. Such being the case, I, of
course, met some Englishmen there: had it been a
region of nothing to eat, but plenty of copper ore, I
should have found a Scotchman or two. For my own
part, I was in a very decidedly English state of mind,
after starving more or less for the previous ten days.
Having already relieved my conscience by confessing
to the fact that I did steal some turnips, I may explain
that they were only two, and those very small; my
principal food during the day being bilberries—very
delicious, but by no means solid and satisfactory. They
call them hlau, or blueberries, here ; their rich colour
justifies the name, and suggests the etymology of the
Scotch name " blaeberry."
I had a sumptuous banquet of ham and eggs, with
bread and a bottle of claret (St. Jullien, of very good
quality); the charge for which was about
seventeen-pence English. The duty on wine is twopence per
bottle.
The man who never had a holiday, and has none
to anticipate; who has no shop, no factory, no office,
no farm, no studio—in short, no daily work to do; but
has been cast upon the world by cruel parents with the
stultifying curse of a large inheritance and no fixed
ambition—the purposeless idler, to whom all the days
of life are of equal dreariness — is perhaps the most
miserable of all human beings. What would he give to
be capable of the sensations of a hard-worked London
apprentice on Easter Monday, or a shopman on Good
Friday! He never knew, nor ever can know, what
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