Twelve months later if you had gone to that same house you would have seen the table littered with prints and negatives. Blessed be untidiness, of that sort at any rate; it generally means, like the dirt on a boy’s face, that someone is happy. There were no tired looks now, and no sending the young people out of the room. Instead, everyone was cheerful, everyone talking at once, and as for father, you would not have known him. Even the children did not know what was coming over him, he was getting so jolly. His friends, too, and he had more of them of late than he used to have, were glad to meet him, instead of fighting shy of him as an old bore like they used to do.
The secret of it all was that he had been to a lecture on birds, and the lecturer had described the fascination of photographing them in their haunts. He had taken it up, and the result was that he had seen more than birds, for his eyes had been opened to all the beauties of Nature, and he had found the world a very pleasant place to live in after all. The fresh air and exercise which he had enjoyed whilst following his new bent had banished his dyspepsia, his headaches had disappeared, and he had forgotten all about the palpitation and vague pains and discomforts that used to worry the life out of him.
His nervous system had taken a new lease of life. He had lost all his dreads and forebodings, and had regained his old confidence in business matters. The old wearing monotony of life had gone, and his brain was alive and keen with varied interests, for no hobby comes alone, it invariably brings its friends along with it. And the more the merrier.
This welcome change in his manner of spending his evenings, the change from wearisome brooding to congenial pastime, had given to his mind the repose it had stood so badly in need of, and for want of which it had been slowly but surely drifting towards a breakdown. For the latter is due, as we have already seen, to a gradual disorganisation of the various functions of the body undermining the nervous system. And a hobby such as this, combining indoor and outdoor pursuits, does more than relieve the tedium of a tired brain, it invigorates every organ and tissue in the body.