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Updated: June 26, 2025
He saw faces about him for an instant shaggy wild Breton faces but they dropped away, he knew not where. The current kept driving him inshore. As in a dream, he could hear the breakers the pumas on their tread-mill of death. How long would it last? How long before he would be beaten upon that tread-mill fondled to death by those mad paws? Presently dreams came-kind, vague, distant dreams.
"A curious illusion," continued Lady Davenant, "occurs with every one making acquaintance with such persons as Lady Masham, I have observed; perhaps it is that some sensation of the tread-mill life she leads, communicates itself to those she is talking to; which makes you fancy you are always getting on, but you never do get beyond a certain point."
The whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill beneath him.
To be treated like this, when I think of all my labors for the benefit of the rascally human race! my Institute, my Lyceum, my Mutual Improvement Association, and Christian Young Men's something. There is no institution, after all, to be compared to the tread-mill."
You could read the Categories in the wrinkles of his colorless face, and contested passages of Thucydides in the crows'-feet round his eyes. The everlasting grind at the educational tread-mill had worn away all he might once have had of imagination; he translated with precisely the same intonations the Tusculan Disputations and Erôs anikate machan.
But besides the momentum of habit there was the official pledge to the people Mayor Monroe's and Commanding-General Lovell's that if they would but keep up this tread-mill gait, the moment the city was really in danger the wires of the new fire-alarm should strike the tidings from all her steeples.
The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell bead bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually thrusting their wares at you, where the same tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the same cafes the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself into a magnificent tread-mill.
It happened, of course, that these two had not taken the smallest share in the disturbance. This scene over, the company returned to picking oakum; the tread-mill, that admirably just invention by which a strong man suffers no fatigue and a weak one loses his health for life, not having been then introduced into our excellent establishments for correcting crime.
Of course they are unconscious of their hypocrisy self-righteousness blinds them to the truth; they think others are to blame for most of the self-righteous one's own hard conditions. The self-righteous one is doomed to a tread-mill of petty failures. He goes round and round his own little personal point of view and learns nothing.
It is strange that a writer who considers the pain derived from the unfavourable sentiments of others as so acute that, if sufficiently at command, it would supersede the use of the gallows and the tread-mill, should take no notice of this most important restraint when discussing the question of government.
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