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 sickly oldest daughter will not get the care she needs if somebody doesn’t go to help out; it means that if we do not do something that bright boy of hers will have to leave school, just when he is in the way of winning a scholarship in college; it means, in short, a crisis in several human lives, which by the mere fact of being known calls forth sympathy as irresistibly as sunshine in May opens the leaf buds.

Just as it is only one lover in a million who can continue to love his mistress during a lifetime of absolute separation from her, so it is one man in a million who can continue his sympathy and interest in his fellow-men without continual close contact with them.  The divine feeling of responsibility for the well-being of others is diluted and washed away in great cities by the overwhelming impersonal flood of vast numbers; in villages it is strengthened by the sight, apparent to the dullest eyes, of immediate personal and visible application.  In other words, we are not only the characters of our unwritten stories, but also part authors.  Something of the final outcome depends upon us, something of the creative instinct of the artist is stirred to life within every one of us ... however unconscious of it in our countrified