if you
can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a
mystery. It makes them feel bigger. Even the Freemasons, who have been
shown up to satiety, preserve a kind of pride; and not a grocer among
them, however honest, harmless, and empty-headed he may feel himself to
be at bottom, but comes home from one of their _coenacula_ with a
portentous significance for himself.

It is an odd thing, how happily two people, if there are two, can live
in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
whole life in which you have no part paralysis personal desire. You are
content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
colonel with his three medals goes by to the _cafe_ at night; the troops
drum and trumpet and man the ramparts, as bold as so many lions. It
would task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place
where you have taken some root, you are provoked out of your
indifference; you have a hand in the game; your friends are fighting
with the army. But in a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon
familiar, nor so large as to have laid itself out for travellers, you
stand so far apart from the business that you positively forget it would
be possible to go nearer; you have so little human interest around you,
that you do not remember yourself to be a man. Perhaps, in a very short
time, you would be one no longer. Gymnosophists go into a wood, with all
nature seething around them, with romance on every side; it would be
much more to the purpose if they took up their abode in a dull country
town, where they should see just so much of humanity as to keep them
from desiring more, and only the stale externals of man's life. These
externals are as dead to us as so many formalities, and speak a dead
language in our eyes and ears. They have no more meaning than an oath or
a salutation. We are so much accustomed to see married couples going to
church of a Sunday that we have clean forgotten what they represent; and
novelists are driven to rehabilitate adultery, no less, when they wish
to show us what a beautiful thing it is for a man and a woman to live
for each other.

One person in Maubeuge, however, showed me something more than his
outside. That was the driver of the hotel omnibus: a mean enough looking
little man, as well as I can remember; but with a spark of something
human in his soul. He had heard of our little journey, and came to me at
once