It is noticeable how many people there are in the world that seem bent
always upon the same purpose of amusement or business as one's self. If
you keep quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all your
neighbors and acquaintance hard at it too; if you go on a journey, choose
what train you will, the cars are filled with travellers in your
direction. You take a day's pleasure, and everybody abandons his usual
occupation to crowd upon your boat, whether it is to Gloucester, or
Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach you go. It is very hard to believe that,
from whatever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the great sum
of it presses forward as before: that business is carried on though you
are idle, that men amuse themselves though you toil, that every train is
as crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre or the church fills its
boxes or pews without you perfectly well. I suppose it would not be quite
agreeable to believe all this; the opposite illusion is far more
flattering; for if each one of us did not take the world with him now at
every turn, should he not have to leave it behind him when he died? And
that, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor is the fact quite
conceivable, though ever so many myriads in so many million years have
proved it.

When our friends first went aboard the "Rose Standish" that day they were
almost the sole passengers, and they had a feeling of ownership and
privacy which was pleasant enough in its way, but which they lost
afterwards; though to lose it was also pleasant, for enjoyment no more
likes to be solitary than sin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and I
dare say would hardly exist if it could not be committed in company. The
preacher, indeed, little knows the comfortable sensation we have in being
called fellow-sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt each
makes of his neighbor's hard-heartedness.