ou in
meager paragraphs snatches of that comprehending and consolatory
philosophy of life, which long ago you should have learned to manufacture
for yourself out of every incident in your daily routine. Of course, if
you don't know your next-door neighbors, and have never had time to listen
to what happened to your grandfather and are too busy catching trains to
philosophize on those subjects if you did know them, no more remains to be
said. By all means patronize the next shop you see which displays in its
show windows canned romances, adventures, tragedies, farces, and the like
line of goods. Live vicariously, if you can't at first hand; but don't be
annoyed at our pity for your method of passing blindfold through life.

And don't expect to find such a shop in our village. To open one there
would be like trying to crowd out the great trees on Hemlock Mountain by
planting a Noah's Ark garden among them. Romances, adventures, tragedies,
and farces ... why, we are the characters of those plots. Every child who
runs past the house starts a new story, every old man whom we leave
sleeping in the burying-ground by the Necronsett River is the ending of
another ... or perhaps the beginning of a sequel. Do you say that in the
city a hundred more children run past the windows of your apartment than
along our solitary street, and that funeral processions cross your every
walk abroad? True, but they are stories written in a tongue
incomprehensible to you. You look at the covers you may even flutter the
leaves and look at the pictures but you cannot tell what they are all
about. You are like people bored and yawning at a performance of a tragedy
by Sophocles, because the actors speak in Greek. So dreadful and moving a
thing as a man's sudden death may happen before your eyes, but you do not
know enough of what it means to be moved by it. For you it is not really a
man who dies. It is the abstract idea of a man, leaving behind him
abstract possibilities of a wife and children. You knew nothing of him,
you know nothing of them, you shudder, look the other way, and hurry
along, your heart a little more blunted to the sorrows of others, a little
more remote from your fellows even than before.

All Hillsboro is more stirred than that, both to sympathy and active help,
by the news that Mrs. Brownell has broken her leg. It means something
unescapably definite to us, about which we not only can, but must take
action. It means that her sick