Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/250

 with the hebdominal session of the council, where one might find now and then some pretty discouraging examples of human meanness. Tuesday was not quite so bad, though it was trying; human nature seemed to run pretty high, or pretty low, on that day, too. By Wednesday, the atmosphere began to clear, and by Thursday and Friday, everyone seemed to be attending to his own business and letting the faults of his neighbors go unnoted or at least unreported, and Saturday was a day of such calm that one's whole faith in humanity was miraculously restored; if the weather was fine one might almost discover human nature as to be good as that nature which would reveal herself on the golf links.

As a result of it all we finally made the deduction—my secretary Bernard Dailey, the stenographers in the office and the reporters who formed so pleasant an element of the life there—that it was all due to the effects of the Sunday that had intervened. In the first place, people had leisure on that day and in that leisure they could whet up their consciences and set them to the congenial task of dissecting the characters of other people, or they could contemplate the evils in the world and resolve highly to make the mayor do away with them, and then after the custom of our land they could gorge on the huge Sunday noon dinner of roast beef, and then lie about all afternoon like pythons in a torpor which produced an indigestion so acute and lasting that for three days it passed very well for pious fervor and zeal for reform. Such at least was our theory, offered here solely in the scientific spirit, and not