And now with respect to the old man who knew Chinese, but could not
tell what was o'clock. This individual was a man whose natural
powers would have been utterly buried and lost beneath a mountain
of sloth and laziness, had not God determined otherwise. He had in
his early years chalked out for himself a plan of life in which he
had his own ease and self-indulgence solely in view; he had no
particular bad passions to gratify, he only wished to live a happy
quiet life, just as if the business of this mighty world could be
carried on by innocent people fond of ease or quiet, or that
Providence would permit innocent quiet drones to occupy any portion
of the earth and to cumber it. God had at any rate decreed that
this man should not cumber it as a drone. He brings a certain
affliction upon him, the agony of which produces that terrible
whirling of the brain which, unless it is stopped in time, produces
madness; he suffers indescribable misery for a period, until one
morning his attention is arrested, and his curiosity is aroused, by
certain Chinese letters on a teapot; his curiosity increases more
and more, and, of course, in proportion as his curiosity is
increased with respect to the Chinese marks, the misery in his
brain, produced by his mental affliction, decreases.
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