esome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in
company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love
to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among
men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is
always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by
the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The
really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge
College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work
alone in the field all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome,
because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he can not sit
down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where
he can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate
himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student
can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui
and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student, tho in the
house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as
the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society
that the latter does, tho it may be a more condensed form of it.

Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not
having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at
meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old
musty cheese that we are. We have to agree on a certain set of rules,
called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting
tolerable and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the
post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night;
we live thick and are in each other's way, and stumble over one
another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another.
Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty
communications. Consider the girls in a factory--never alone, hardly
in their dreams. It would be better if there were but one inhabitant
to a square mile, as where I live. The value of a man is not in his
skin, that we should touch him.

I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning,
when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that some one may
convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely than the loon in
the pond that laughs so loud, or tha