s
In West Philadelphia
Horace Traubel

II. _New York_:
The Anatomy of Manhattan
Vesey Street
Brooklyn Bridge
Three Hours for Lunch
Passage from Some Memoirs
First Lessons in Clowning
House Hunting
Long Island Revisited
On Being in a Hurry
Confessions of a Human Globule
Notes on a Fifth Avenue Bus
Sunday Morning
Venison Pasty
Grand Avenue, Brooklyn

On Waiting for the Curtain to Go Up 236

Musings of John Mistletoe 240

The World's Most Famous Oration 242

On Laziness 244

Teaching the Prince to Take Notes 249

A City Notebook 253

On Going to Bed 270

PIPEFULS

ON MAKING FRIENDS

[Illustration]

Considering that most friendships are made by mere hazard, how is it
that men find themselves equipped and fortified with just the friends
they need? We have heard of men who asserted that they would like to
have more money, or more books, or more pairs of pyjamas; but we have
never heard of a man saying that he did not have enough friends. For,
while one can never have too many friends, yet those one has are always
enough. They satisfy us completely. One has never met a man who would
say, "I wish I had a friend who would combine the good humour of A, the
mystical enthusiasm of B, the love of doughnuts which is such an
endearing quality in C, and who would also have the habit of giving
Sunday evening suppers like D, and the well-stocked cellar which is so
deplorably lacking in E." No; the curious thing is that at any time and
in any settled way of life a man is generally provided with friends far
in excess of his desert, and also in excess of his capacity to absorb
their wisdom and affectionate attentions.

There is some pleasant secret behind this, a secret that none is wise
enough to fathom. The infinite fund of disinterested humane kindliness
that is adrift in the world is part of the riddle, the insoluble riddle
of life that is born in our blood and tissue. It is agreeable to think
that no man, save by his own gross fault, ever went through life
unfriended, without companions to whom he could stammer his momentary
impulses of sagacity, to whom he could turn in hours of loneliness. It
is not even necessary to know a man to be his friend. One can sit at a
lun