ng?" said I. "What cause?"

"Helping to make the wheels go round. Being in the swim. Doing as others
do. Trying to make a little money and a little name, and following the
fashions of a carnal-minded generation. I could see no point to it, Bob;
the game never seemed worth the candle."

"And so you came out in the woods, like what's his name--that Concord
fellow. Do you find this any better?"

"Negatively. I am not so much a part of the things I despise. The pomps
and vanities are conspicuous chiefly by their absence. It is a simpler
life, comparatively laudable for there being less of it."

"And don't you get bored, out here? A week or so of it is well enough in
a way; but take it the year round, I should think you'd find it worse
than civilization."

"I get bored, of course: that is incidental to life, and chronic with
one who has looked beneath the surface and sifted values. But it's not
so oppressive as in town. There are no shams here, to speak of. Having
no business and no society, we don't pretend to be very different from
what we are."

"O, if you come to that, the women still improve on nature, and the
street has its little tricks and methods; but you could keep out of
them. You were in the law."

"It's all the same, Bob. The law now is worked much more as a business
than as a science. Look at Jones, and Brown, and Jenkins: they are
getting on, I hear. I don't want to get on in that way."

"But you might have taken the scientific side of it. With your head
piece, and your high and mighty notions, there was a field for you."

"So is theology a field, or physic, or Greek roots, or chiropody--for
him, who believes in them. I was not able to see that one line of
thought has a right to crowd out all the rest, or to sink my whole soul
in a profession. That's what they want of you now--to make a little
clearing, and put up palings all round it, and see things outside only
through the chinks of your blessed fence. Be a narrow specialist: know
one thing, and care for nothing else. I suppose you can do that with
oil."

I thought there was some uncalled-for bitterness in this; but the poor
fellow can't be contented, with his lonesome and aimless life. "We're
not talking about me, Jim. You're the topic. Stick to your text, and
preach away: my soul is not so immersed in oil that I can't listen. But
I don't blame you for going back on the law; a beast of a business, I
always thought it. Why didn't you go for a Pro