as happy as a sand-boy. Virtual happy hour：虛擬歡樂時光

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel

https://books.google.com.tw/books?isbn=1461741351

Aldous Huxley - 1993 - ‎Fiction

A Novel Aldous Huxley. between ... “With a course of thiamine chloride and some testosterone, I could have made him as happy as a sand— boy. Has it ever ...

Aldous Huxley: 1935/1939

With a course of thiamin chloride and some testosterone I could have made him as happy as a sand-boy.
用些塩化｛えんか｝チアミン維生素B1和一些睾酮我可以讓他飄飄然。

T. H. Huxley: Letters and Diary 1874 - Clark University

aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/letters/74.html

I am as jolly as a sandboy so long as I live on a minimum and drink no alcohol, and as vigorous as ever I was in my life. But a late dinner wakes up my demoniac ...

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel

A Novel Aldous Huxley. between ... “With a course of thiamine chloride and some testosterone 1935, I could have made him as happy as a sand— boy. Has it ever ...

sandboy 

Pronunciation: /ˈsan(d)bɔɪ/ 

NOUN

(in phrase(as)happy as a sandboy)

Extremely happy or carefree.

Example sentences

• When he came back to Europe he married a Dutch girl and is now back in the Pacific as happy as a sand boy.

Origin

Probably originally denoting a boy hawking sand for sale. 一些酒吧相關的傳說：

What is a sandboy and why are they happy? | Notes and Queries 

Virtual happy hour：虛擬歡樂時光

與新型病毒一樣，封鎖的前幾周也是新奇的體驗。當人們尋找新的方法讓自己有事可做，並試圖在家中保持某種常態時，如何社交成了重要的問題。因此，虛擬歡樂時光就成了一天裡最重要的事情。酒以及quarantinis（隔離馬天尼）下肚的速度就像Zoom活動邀請來的一樣快，然後我們都……好吧，我們所有人就在電腦前喝醉了。

SEMANTIC ENIGMAS What is a sandboy and why are they happy? Megan Barford, Hebden Bridge, UK Publicans used to spread sand on bar floors to catch slops, spills, spit and so on. The sand was delivered by sandboys. Hauling sand was thirsty work, and they were part paid in drink. This kept them merry. And, anyway, happy was the man who got free booze.

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As happy as a sandboy

'Sandboy' brings to mind images of children playing on the beach, making sand-castles and the like. That sounds happy enough, but it isn't the source of the phrase. In fact, sandboys were tradesmen who delivered sand to public houses, theatres and homes in the 18th and 19th centuries. Children were used in that trade, but most sandboys were adults.
The earliest printed citation of the phrase that I can find is from Pierce Egan's Real Life in London, 1821:

"...appeared to be as happy as a sand-boy, who had unexpectedly met with good luck in disposing of his hampers full of the above household commodity. "

Charles Dickens made an oblique reference to the variant form of the phrase, 'as jolly as a sand-boy', in his 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop, in which the inn The Jolly  Sandboys features.
Carting sand was hard, dusty and not especially happiness-inducing work. The sandboys' reputation for happiness seems to derive from their reputation of frequent intoxication.

*****

HAPPY AS A SANDBOY

[Q] From Niki Wessels, South Africa; a related question came from Robert Metcalf in Singapore: “Our family recently discussed the expression happy as a sandboy, and wondered where and how it originated. My dictionary informs me that a sandboy is a kind of flea — but why a boy, and why is it happy?”
[A] Let me add an explanatory note to your question, as American readers have probably never heard this saying. It is mostly known in Britain and the Commonwealth, though it is not so common these days even in those countries. The first examples we know about are from London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Another form current at the time was as jolly as a sandboy. Both are proverbial sayings that suggest a carefree and untroubled state of mind.
None of my reference works hint at a connection with fleas (sand fleas exist, of course, but they hardly seem relevant). However, a writer in Notes & Queries in 1866, answering much the same query as yours, comments that: “Sandboy is the vulgar name of a small insect which may be found in the loose sand so common on the seashore. This insect hops and leaps in a manner strongly suggestive of jollity, and hence I imagine the simile arises”. So your dictionary is part-right: it was once a colloquial or dialect word for a sand flea.
The usual explanation is mundane in the extreme: sandboys sold sand. The word boy here was a common term for a male worker of lower class (as in bellboy, cowboy, and stableboy), which comes from an old sense of a servant. It doesn’t imply the sellers were necessarily young, though one early description does mention urchins doing the selling. There’s no link, by the way, with the sandman, the personification of sleep, which came into English several decades later in translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories.
The selling of sand wasn’t such a peculiar occupation as you might think, as there was once quite a need for it. It was used to scour pans and tools and was sprinkled on floors. By the time that Henry Mayhew wrote about it in his London Labour and the London Poor in 1861 he had to say that “The trade is inconsiderable to what it was, saw-dust having greatly superseded it in the gin-palace, the tap-room, and the butcher’s shop”. The sand was dug out from pits on Hampstead Heath and taken down in horse-drawn carts to be hawked through the streets. Early records also supply an image of sandboys selling their wares from panniers carried on donkeys.
The job was hard work and badly paid. Mayhew records these comments from one of the excavators on Hampstead Heath: “My men work very hard for their money, sir; they are up at 3 o’clock of the morning, and are knocking about the streets, perhaps till 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening”.
Their prime characteristic, it seems, was an inexhaustible desire for beer. Charles Dickens referred to the saying, already by then proverbial, in The Old Curiosity Shop in 1841: “The Jolly Sandboys was a small road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a sign, representing three Sandboys increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale”. A writer in Appleton’s Journal in the USA in 1872 remarked that the saying presumably arose because “as sand-boys follow a very dry and dusty trade, they are traditionally believed to require a great deal of liquor to moisten their clay”.
Quite so. But I suspect that the long hours and hard work involved in carrying and shovelling sand, plus the poor returns, meant that sandboys didn’t have much cause to look happy in the normal run of things, improving only when they’d had a pint or two, when they became tipsily cheerful. My guess is that at first the saying was meant ironically. Only when the trade of sandboy had died out around the middle of the century could it be taken as a figurative reference to happiness. Certainly, to judge from the answers to the question in Notes & Queries in 1866, even by then its origin was obscure.