wearing shoes and bonnets, but when fashion ordains French heels and dead birds, if I decline to walk in file with the conformist, I am something of a hero, perhaps, and certainly preserve my own self-respect better than if I yielded to either a harmful or a cruel custom.  When etiquette rules that I go through the world armed with a haughty reserve, like a picket soldier with a shotgun, if I conform to that rule, I act upon the warm impulses of natural living as the refrigerator acts upon meat; I may preserve the proprieties, but I chill the juices.

XXXV.

IF GOD MADE YOU A WILLOW DON’T TRY TO BE A PINE

I wish I could spend a fortnight in a world where folks dared to be true to themselves; where the conformist was shelved with last year’s calendars, and a man studied out his own route to heaven and had the courage to walk in it.  I would like to dwell with individuals and not with packs of human cards shuffled together in sets.  I would like to feel my soul kindle into respect for distinct personalities, each one making his garment after his own measurement, and not trying to fit his coat after the cut of his neighbor’s jacket.  I would like to live for a while with men and women, rather than with human sheep blindly following a leader.  Life is something better than a sheep-path aimlessly skirting the hills.  It is a growth upward through the infinite blue into heaven.  It is the spreading of many and various branches.  If you are a willow, don’t attempt to be a pine, and if the Lord made you to grow like an elm don’t pattern yourself after a scrub oak.  The rebuke “what will people say?” should never be applied to the waywardness of a child.  Teach it rather to ask:  “How will my own self-respect stand this test?” Such training will evolve something rarer in the way of development than a candle-mold or a yard-stick.

XXXVI.

Two types.

How full the streets are, to be sure!  Where do all the folks come from and where do they stop?  Surely there are not roofs enough to cover the steady stream of humanity that courses through the thoroughfares from dawn to night time.  To one who walks much to and fro in the town there comes a rare chance to study human types.  Books hold nothing within their covers so grotesque and so pathetic, so inexplicable and so queer as the folks that jostle one another on the streets!  There is the precise female who nips along in a little apologetic way, as though there was an impropriety in the very act of locomotion for which she would fain atone.  From the crown of her head to her boot tips she is proper, stupid and decorous, but too much of her company would prove to endurance what sultry weather proves to cream.  In fact, I think if I were told I had to live with some of the women I meet on the streets, I would fall on my hat pin, as the old Romans did upon their swords, as the pleasanter alternative.  There is nothing more charming than a bright woman, but she must be superior to her own environments and be able to talk and think about other things than a correct code of etiquette, her costumes and her domestic concerns.