Especially do I enjoy all travelling people.  I wait for them (how eagerly) here on my farm.  I watch the world drift by in daily tides upon the road, flowing outward in the morning toward the town, and as surely at evening drifting back again.  I look out with a pleasure impossible to convey upon those who come this way from the town:  the Syrian woman going by in the gray town road, with her bright-coloured head-dress, and her oil-cloth pack; and the Old-ironman with his dusty wagon, jangling his little bells, and the cheerful weazened Herb-doctor in his faded hat, and the Signman with his mouth full of nails—­how they are all marked upon by the town, all dusted with the rosy bloom of human experience.  How often in fancy I have pursued them down the valley and watched them until they drifted out of sight beyond the hill!  Or how often I have stopped them or they (too willingly) have stopped me—­and we have fenced and parried with fine bold words.

If you should ever come by my farm—­you, whoever you are—­take care lest I board you, hoist my pirate flag, and sail you away to the Enchanted Isle where I make my rendezvous.

It is not short of miraculous how, with cultivation, one’s capacity for friendship increases.  Once I myself had scarcely room in my heart for a single friend, who am now so wealthy in friendships.  It is a phenomenon worthy of consideration by all hardened disbelievers in that which is miraculous upon this earth that when a man’s heart really opens to a friend he finds there room for two, And when he takes in the second, behold the skies lift, and the earth grows wider, and he finds there room for two more!

In a curious passage (which I understand no longer darkly) old mystical Swedenborg tells of his wonderment that the world of spirits (which he says he visited so familiarly) should not soon become too small for all the swelling hosts of its ethereal inhabitants, and was confronted with the discovery that the more angels there were, the more heaven to hold them!

So let it be with our friendships!

THE END