Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/154

 ing. And the note of the tom cat, as he sings to his love in the stilly night, outside on the tiles, becomes positively distasteful when heard so near.

No, for living in, give me a suite of rooms on the first floor of a Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but, for thinking in, let me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of the city. I have all Herr Teufelsdröckh's affection for attics. There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull murmur of the human tide, ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the narrow streets and lanes below. How small men seem, how like a swarm of ants sweltering in endless confusion on their tiny hill! How petty seems the work on which they are hurrying and skurrying! How childishly they jostle against one another, and turn to snarl and scratch! They jabber and screech and curse, but their puny voices do not reach up here. They fret, and fume, and rage, and pant, and die; "but I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."

The most extraordinary attic I ever came across was one a friend and I once shared, many years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, from Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that room was the eccentricalist. The architect who designed it must have been a genius, though I cannot help thinking that his talents