but his prison walls
move with him and hem him in on every side. In the busy street, in the
crowded room, in the grind of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the
many or amid the few--wherever men congregate together, wherever the
music of human speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human
eyes, there, shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands
apart. His soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not.
The iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath
is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to his
lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel clamps. His
heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is dumb. Contempt
and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and finding no
safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst forth, they
only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn and love of a
deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester and corrupt
within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour him into a
misanthrope and cynic.

Yes, shy men, like ugly women, have a bad time of it in this world, to
go through which with any comfort needs the hide of a rhinoceros. Thick
skin is, indeed, our moral clothes, and without it we are not fit to be
seen about in civilized society. A poor gasping, blushing creature, with
trembling knees and twitching hands, is a painful sight to every one,
and if it cannot cure itself, the sooner it goes and hangs itself the
better.

The disease can be cured. For the comfort of the shy, I can assure them
of that from personal experience. I do not like speaking about myself,
as may have been noticed, but in the cause of humanity I on this
occasion will do so, and will confess that at one time I was, as the
young man in the Bab Ballad says, "the shyest of the shy," and "whenever
I was introduced to any pretty maid, my knees they knocked together just
as if I was afraid." Now, I would--nay, have--on this very day
before yesterday I did the deed. Alone and entirely by myself (as the
school-boy said in translating the "Bellum Gallicum") did I beard a
railway refreshment-room young lady in her own lair. I rebuked her in
terms of mingled bitterness and sorrow for her callousness and want of
condescension. I insisted, courteously but firmly, on being accorded
that deference and attention that was the right of the traveling Briton,
and at the end I