of their opinions. When men can do this, they are apt to feel a
greater degree of freedom in following their natural impulses. If men
could sound the depths of all knowledge and read with ease the secrets
of the universe, they might lose much of their reverence. When they
know the exact worth of the judgment of their fellow-men, they begin
to regard it with comparative indifference. And so, if a dweller in a
small village desires to leave the beaten track, he can summon courage
to do so with greater readiness than the man of the town. If he has
occasionally that proneness to make a fool of himself which seizes
every man now and then, he may indulge in the perilous luxury without
great carefulness of the consequences. Smith's ordinary conduct is the
admiration of Jones as a regular thing; but when Smith switches off
into some eccentricity for which Jones has no inclination, it is
only a matter of course that Jones should indulge in his own little
oddities without caring whether Smith smiles upon him or not.

It is, therefore, in such communities that search can most profitably
be made for raw human nature that has had room to grow upon every side
with little check or hindrance. The man who chooses to seek may
find original characters, queer combinations of events, surprising
revelations of individual and family experiences and an unlimited fund
of amusement, especially if he is disposed, perhaps even while he
submits to an overpowering conviction that all life is tragic, to
summon into prominence those humorous phases of social existence
which, as in the best of artificial tragedies, are permitted to appear
in real life as the foil of that which is truly sorrowful. To depict
events that are simply amusing may not be the highest and best
function of a writer; but if he has a strong impulse to undertake
such a task in the intervals of more serious work, it may be that he
performs a duty which is more obvious because the common inclination