him is not so much that he comes as that he won’t go.  He hangs around.  If you once open your door to him, there is no getting rid of him; and some of his followers, it must be confessed, are just like him.  You must resist them both, or they will never flee.  But if they do flee after a day’s tarry, do not complain.  You protest against turning your house into a hotel.  Why, the hotelry is the least irksome part of the whole business, when your guests are uninteresting.  It is not the supper or the bed that costs, but keeping people going after supper is over and before bed-time is come.  Never complain, if you have nothing worse to do than to feed or house your guests for a day or an hour.

On the other hand, if they are people you like, how much better to have them come so than not to come at all!  People cannot often make long visits,—­people that are worth anything,—­people who use life; and they are the only ones that are worth anything.  And if you cannot get your good things in the lump, are you going to refuse them altogether?  By no means.  You are going to take them by driblets, and if you will only be sensible and not pout, but keep your tin pan right side up, you will find that golden showers will drizzle through all your life.  So, with never a nugget in your chest, you shall die rich.  If you can stop over-night with your friend, you have no sand-grain, but a very respectable boulder.  For a night is infinite.  Daytime is well enough for business, but it is little worth for happiness.  You sit down to a book, to a picture, to a friend, and the first you know it is time to get dinner, or time to eat it, or time for the train, or you must put out your dried apples, or set the bread to rising, or something breaks in impertinently and chokes you off at flood-tide.  But the night has no end.  Everything is done but that which you would be forever doing.  The curtains are drawn, the lamp is lighted and veiled into exquisite soft shadowiness.  All the world is far off.  All its din and dole strike into the bank of darkness that envelops you and are lost to your tranced sense.  In all the world are only your friend and you, and then you strike out your oars, silver-sounding, into the shoreless night.

But the night comes to an end, you say.  No, it does not.  It is you that come to an end.  You grow sleepy, clod that you are.  But as you don’t think, when you begin, that you ever shall grow sleepy, it is just the same as if you never did.  For you have no foreshadow of an inevitable termination to your rapture, and so practically your night has no limit.  It is fastened at one end to the sunset, but the other end floats off into eternity.  And there really is no abrupt termination.  You roll down the inclined plane of your social happiness into the bosom of another happiness,—­sleep.  Sleep for the sleepy is bliss just as truly as society to the lonely.  What in the distance would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your