vote, or to discharge any of the duties of a good
citizen. Life is wholly embittered to you.

Yet, six weeks after, you sit before a soft-coal fire
in your new house, with the feeling that you have always
lived there. You are not even grateful that you are
there. You have forgotten the plumber's name; and if you
met in the street that nice carpenter that drove things
through, you would just nod to him, and would not think
of kissing him or embracing him.

Thus completely have you accepted the situation.

Let me confess that the same experience is that with
which, at this writing, I regard the BRICK MOON. It is
there in ether. I cannot keep it. I cannot get it down.
I cannot well go to it,--though possibly that might be
done, as you will see. They are all very happy there,--
much happier, as far as I can see, than if they lived in
sixth floors in Paris, in lodgings in London, or even in
tenement-houses in Phoenix Place, Boston. There are
disadvantages attached to their position; but there are
also advantages. And what most of all tends to our
accepting the situation is, that there is "nothing that
we can do about it," as Q. says, but to keep up our
correspondence with them, and to express our sympathies.

For them, their responsibilities are reduced in
somewhat the same proportion as the gravitation which
binds them down,--I had almost said to earth,--which