on of many masterpieces
of that art which, more than any other, he had crossed the seas to seek.
He has never yet been able to return to Basle; but for a sight of those
lost portraits of the most honest and straightforward of all German
painters, he would gladly sell his memories of both Lucerne and
Heidelberg.

Here we have a record of a great disappointment that was occasioned merely
by the common habit of despising railway junctions, and presuming them to
be inevitably dull. But this same unfortunate presumption, applied to life
at large, leads many people to overlook the nearness of some great
adventure. Interrogate a thousand men, and you will find that none of them
has first set eyes upon his greatest friend in the Mosque of Cordoba or in
Trafalgar Square. Every adventure of lasting consequence has confronted
all of them, without exception, in some hidden nook or cranny of the
world,--some place unknown to fame. Anybody is as likely to meet the woman
who is destined to become his wife, at Essex Junction on a wintry night,
as in the Parthenon by moonlight in the month of May. The most romantic
places in the world are often those that promised, in advance, to be the
least romantic.

Since this is so, how can anybody ever dare to shut his eyes to that
incalculable imminency of adventure which environs him even when he is
merely changing trains on some island-platform of the New York Subway? In
our daily living we are never safe from destiny; and who can ever know in
what vacuous and sedentary period of his experience he may suddenly be
called upon to entertain an angel unawares? It is best to be prepared for
anything, at any hour of our lives,--even at those moments that must,
perforce, be "spent waiting at a railway junction."

MINOR USES OF THE MIDDLING RICH

To assert today that the rich are for the most part entirely harmless is
to dare much, for the contrary opinion is greatly in favor. Such wholesale
condemnation of the rich assumes a more general and a more specific form.
They are said to be harmful to the body politic simply because they have
more money than the average: their property has been wrongly taken from
persons who have a better right to it, or is withheld from people who need
it more. But aside from being constructively a moral detriment from the
mere possession of wealth, the rich man may do specific harm through
indulging his vices, maintaining an inordinate display, charging too much