When the shine boy offers to burnish our shoes, we call his attention to: 

     He who closes his mouth and shuts his sense gates will be free
     from trouble to the end of life.

When the barber suggests that if we were now to have a liberal douche of bay rum sprayed over our poll it would be a glittering consummation of his task, we show him the words: 

     If one tries to improve a thing, he mars it.

And when (finally) the irritated tonsor suggests that if we don’t wait so long next time before getting our hair cut we will not be humiliated by our condition, we exhibit Lao-Tse’s aphorism: 

     The wise man is inaccessible to favour or hate; he cannot be
     reached by profit or injury; he cannot be honoured or
     humiliated.

“It’s very easy,” says the barber as we pay our check; “just drop in here once a month and we’ll fix you up.”  And we point to: 

     The wise man lives in the world, but he lives cautiously,
     dealing with the world cautiously.  Many things that appear easy
     are full of difficulties.

* * * * *

To a lot of people who are in a mortal scurry and excitement what is so maddening as the calm and unruffled serenity of a dignified philosopher who gazes unperturbed upon their pangs?  So did we meditate when facing the deliberate and mild tranquillity of the priestly person presiding over the bulletin board announcing the arrival of trains at the Pennsylvania Station.  It was in that desperate and curious limbo known as the “exit concourse,” where baffled creatures wait to meet others arriving on trains and maledict the architect who so planned matters that the passengers arrive on two sides at once, so that one stands grievously in the middle slewing his eyes to one side and another in a kind of vertigo, attempting to con both exits.  We cannot go into this matter in full (when, indeed, will we find enough white paper and enough energy to discuss anything in full, in the way, perhaps, Henry James would have blanketed it?), but we will explain that we were waiting to meet someone, someone we had never seen, someone of the opposite sex and colour, in short, that rare and desirable creature a cook, imported from another city, and she had missed her train, and all we knew was her first name and that she would wear a “brown turban.”  After prowling distraitly round the station (and a large station it is) and asking every likely person if her name was Amanda, and being frowned upon and suspected as a black slaver, and thinking we felt on our neck the heated breath and handcuffs of the Travellers’ Aid Society, we decided that Amanda must have missed her train and concluded to wait for the next.  Then it was, to return to our thesis, that we had occasion to observe and feel in our own person the wretched pangs of one in despair facing the gentle—­shall we say hesychastic?—­peace