Page:The Anatomy of Tobacco.pdf/15

 cannot help feeling that the Marshalsea in "Little Dorrit" is a great adventure. To the rational man a black ravine of rocks with towering and machicolated walls above it, with no possibility of growing wheat in it, or of fetching profitable meals out of it, is a mere blank, dead stupidity of nature; it is not even horrible, but only silly and offensive, a joke in the worst taste. But to the super-rational man, such as Dickens; here is a place of wonder and terrors, fairies and demons, a place to shudder from, certainly, but a place to rejoice over also—as one sits by the shining hearth, behind the close shut door, many a mile away across the waste.

Most men, not merely authors, are men of one idea; putting it more pleasantly, we all have a bee in our bonnets; and I am inclined to think that the bee in my bonnet, or at all events the principal bee, is an acute relish of the infinite differences of life, even from the heights unto the depths. It is a favourite amusement of mine here in my garden in St. John's Wood, to pluck two leaves from a tree,