th mine. I think I never saw her but
twice. She manifested her existence sometimes by complaining of the
romping of the children overhead, who called her the "bonne femme."
Why they gave her the name I don't know; for she seemed to have no
human ties in the world, and wasted her affections on a private
menagerie of parrots, canaries, and poodle-dogs. A few shocks of the
electric telegraph might have raised her out of her desert island, and
given her some glimpses of the great continents of human love and
sympathy.

A man who lives for himself alone sits on a sort of insulated glass
stool, with a _noli-me-tangere_ look at his fellow-men, and a
shivering dread of some electric shock from contact with them. He is a
non-conductor in relation to the great magnetic currents which run
pulsing along the invisible wires that connect one heart with another.
Preachers, philanthropists, and moralists are in the habit of saying
of such a person,--"How cold! how selfish! how unchristian!" I
sometimes fancy a citizen of the planet Venus, that social star of
evening and morning, might say,--"How absurd!" What a figure he cuts
there, sitting in solitary state upon his glass tripod,--in the middle
of a crowd of excited fellow-beings, hurried to and fro by their
passions and sympathies,--like an awkward country-bumpkin caught in
the midst of a gay crowd of polkers and waltzers at a ball,--or an
oyster bedded on a rock, with silver fishes playing rapid games of
hide and seek, love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and
beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense
spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely
tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak
and hood,--shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive,
as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,--like
the man who fancied himself a teapot, and was forever warning people
not to come too near him,--might furnish a subject for a planetary
joke not unworthy of translation into the language of our dim earth.

One need not be a lonely bachelor, nor a lonely spinster, in order to
live alone. The loneliest are those who mingle with men bodily and yet
have no contact with them spiritually. There is no desert solitude
equal to that of a crowded city where you have no sympathies. I might
here quote Paris again, in illustration,--or, indeed, any foreign
city. A friend of mine had an _atelier_