on in our economy. This may apply to society. We are
all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so
violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom
and color. But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the
leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic
mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out? It is not contrast
altogether. For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and again and
again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision is shut in
by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these wind-swept
plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons. We shall long
to be weary of it all again--its vast nakedness, its shimmering heat, its
cold, star-studded nights. It seems paradoxical, but it is probably true,
that a society composed altogether of agreeable people would become a
terrible bore. We are a "kittle" lot, and hard to please for long. We
know how it is in the matter of climate. Why is it that the masses of the
human race live in the most disagreeable climates to be found on the
globe, subject to extremes of heat and cold, sudden and unprovoked
changes, frosts, fogs, malarias? In such regions they congregate, and
seem to like the vicissitudes, to like the excitement of the struggle
with the weather and the patent medicines to keep alive. They hate the
agreeable monotony of one genial day following another the year through.
They praise this monotony, all literature is full of it; people always
say they are in search of the equable climate; but they continue to live,
nevertheless, or try to live, in the least equable; and if they can find
one spot more disagreeable than another there they build a big city. If
man could make his ideal climate he would probably be dissatisfied with
it in a month. The effect of climate upon disposition and upon manners
needs to be considered some day; but we are now only trying to understand
the attractiveness of the disagreeable. There must be some reason for it;
and that would explain a social phenomenon, why there are so many
unattractive people, and why the attractive readers of these essays could
not get on without them.

The writer of this once traveled for days with an intelligent curmudgeon,
who made himself at all points as prickly as the porcupine. There was no
getting on with him. And yet when he dropped out of the party he was
sorely missed. He was more