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There was an Austrian colonel, on his way to join his regiment in Prague; there was a Prussian merchant, a traveller, like ourselves, for amusement's sake; there were a Saxon lawyer, a Moravian banker, and last, though not least, as perfect a specimen of the tribe John Bull, as the eye of the naturalist need desire to behold.
I was my own stalker, taking a couple of gillies for the ponies, but finding the deer for myself always the most difficult part of the sport and stalking them for myself. I may here observe that, not very long after I married, qualms of conscience smote me as to the justifiability of killing, AND WOUNDING, animals for amusement's sake. The more I thought of it, the less it bore thinking about.
Faria had dug his way through fifty feet, Dantes would dig a hundred; Faria, at the age of fifty, had devoted three years to the task; he, who was but half as old, would sacrifice six; Faria, a priest and savant, had not shrunk from the idea of risking his life by trying to swim a distance of three miles to one of the islands Daume, Rattonneau, or Lemaire; should a hardy sailer, an experienced diver, like himself, shrink from a similar task; should he, who had so often for mere amusement's sake plunged to the bottom of the sea to fetch up the bright coral branch, hesitate to entertain the same project?
I mean simply to say, that walking, and running, and gardening, and farming, and house-keeping, usually involve enough of physical exercise for health; and that where these are duly attended to or even any one of them what are commonly called amusement's will hardly be needed. In earlier life, they unquestionably may be.
But whether it be that their organisms have stored up such a quantity of sunshine during the summer as enables them to defy the winter's cold, or whether their Southern blood runs more rapidly in their veins, it is certain that men, women and children and especially the women will for amusement's sake expose themselves to a degree of cold and inclement weather that a Northerner would shrink from.
Nevertheless, for amusement's sake, as I must needs be at my desk an hour or so in the afternoon, I took to the sporting branch of the law, the pitfalls, and the ambuscades; and of all the traps to be laid therein, pedigrees are the rarest. There is scarce a man worth a cross of butter, but what you may find a hole in his shield within four generations.
Occasionally they would have a school-day on which the local dignitaries would be invited, and on a number of these occasions the doctor was, for amusement's sake merely, a grave and reverent listener. On one occasion, however, he was merely passing the school, when hearing "Africa-a, Africa-a, mountains of the moo-oo-oon" drawled out of the windows, he decided to stop in and listen a while.
His name was d'Entragues; he was a fine-looking man, though somewhat thin, and had a good share of wit and knowledge of the world. We had not played together for two days, when one afternoon he asked if I would like to take my revenge. "No, I think not," said I, "for we don't play on the same principle. I play for amusement's sake and you play to win money." "What do you mean?
But the abbe said pleasantly that I had much better come and make a bank at faro, and as everything echoed this suggestion I had to give in. The cards were brought in, and various coloured counters handed round, and I sat down putting thirty ducats before me. This was a very large sum for a company who only played for amusement's sake; fifteen counters were valued only at a sequin.
Merely for amusement's sake he had often "roughed it" in quarters far less comfortable than these bare but well-built huts which even proved, on investigation, to contain beds: an unexpected luxury. "I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty bed. It's the hut at the end of the line."
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