nature of shutting the stable door after the steed is away. But I
have no doubt they help to keep up a good spirit at home. It is a
great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or
other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the
Freemasons, who have been shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of
pride; and not a grocer among them, however honest, harmless, and
empty-headed he may feel himself to be at bottom, but comes home
from one of their coenacula with a portentous significance for
himself.

It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can
live in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the
spectacle of a whole life in which you have no part paralyses
personal desire. You are content to become a mere spectator. The
baker stands in his door; the colonel with his three medals goes by
to the cafe at night; the troops drum and trumpet and man the
ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It would task language to say
how placidly you behold all this. In a place where you have taken
some root, you are provoked out of your indifference; you have a
hand in the game; your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so
large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far
apart from the business, that you positively forget it would be
possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around
you, that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a
very short time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into
a wood, with all nature seething around them, with romance on every
side; it would be much more to the purpose if they took up their
abode in a dull country town, where they should see just so much of
humanity as to keep them from desiring more, and only the stale