Indolent Essays Author:Richard Dowling General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1889 Original Publisher: Ward and Downey Subjects: English essays Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Milli... more »on-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ZERO IN SPACE The British Workman has been exorcised out of my room, and is now in partibus infidelium -- I mean the kitchen. If my condition last week was affecting, it is now heartbreaking. Then I confronted chaos, now I am face to face with raw material and a rescript from necessity to build again and put in order. I haven't many books -- over five hundred, and under a thousand. It is not lucky to count your winnings at cards. I have never counted my books, for although they are not the fruit of gambling they come of many hazards and chances, and a great number of them have been won from " the other side," the " great majority," the hands of spirits that have been reading in the Sealed Book of the Hereafter years and years, and find no occasion for mere temporal pages. The whole lot, if sold under the hammer, would not fetch theprice of a first-class ticket to India. Yet what journeys beyond the remotest rim of earth have they not taken me! They are my particular couriers of the air. They arrange for all my wider wanderings abroad. They hire the gig and pay the tolls when I tool my spavined tandem in the courses of the sun. They are the Ganymedes of the thin hippocrene allowed to me by the discreet gods. I have no carriage but the ivory chariots they let out by the hour ; no yacht but the pearly shallops of swift length, and hollow buoyancy, and melodious wake, ever in trim, alert for enterprise, kept swinging in salt water ready for my flag and the remotest green harbours of the earth, or the furthermost blue bays of empyrean seas. ...« less