by the exercise of more openness of mind and toleration.  To some people Yankee thrift is disagreeable; to others, Southern shiftlessness is intolerable.  To some travelers the negro of the South, with his tropical nature, his capacity for picturesque attitudes, his abundant trust in Providence, is an element of restfulness; and if the chief object of life is happiness, the traveler may take a useful hint from the race whose utmost desire, in a fit climate, would be fully satisfied by a shirt and a banana-tree.  But to another traveler the dusky, careless race is a continual affront.

If a person is born with an “Ego,” and gets the most enjoyment out of the world by trying to make it revolve about himself, and cannot make-allowances for differences, we have nothing to say except to express pity for such a self-centred condition; which shuts him out of the never-failing pleasure there is in entering into and understanding with sympathy the almost infinite variety in American life.

JUVENTUS MUNDI

Sometimes the world seems very old.  It appeared so to Bernard of Cluny in the twelfth century, when he wrote: 

        “The world is very evil,
        The times are waning late.”

There was a general impression among the Christians of the first century of our era that the end was near.  The world must have seemed very ancient to the Egyptians fifteen hundred years before Christ, when the Pyramid of Cheops was a relic of antiquity, when almost the whole circle of arts, sciences, and literature had been run through, when every nation within reach had been conquered, when woman had been developed into one of the most fascinating of beings, and even reigned more absolutely than Elizabeth or Victoria has reigned since:  it was a pretty tired old world at that time.  One might almost say that the further we go back the older and more “played out” the world appears, notwithstanding that the poets, who were generally pessimists of the present, kept harping about the youth of the world and the joyous spontaneity of human life in some golden age before their time.  In fact, the world is old in spots—­in Memphis and Boston and Damascus and Salem and Ephesus.  Some of these places are venerable in traditions, and some of them are actually worn out and taking a rest from too much civilization—­lying fallow, as the saying is.  But age is so entirely relative that to many persons the landing of the Mayflower seems more remote than the voyage of Jason, and a Mayflower chest a more antique piece of furniture than the timbers of the Ark, which some believe can still be seen on top of Mount Ararat.  But, speaking generally, the world is still young and growing, and a considerable portion of it unfinished.  The oldest part, indeed, the Laurentian Hills, which were first out of water, is still only sparsely settled; and no one pretends that Florida is anything like finished, or that the delta of the Mississippi is in anything more than the process of formation.  Men are so young and lively in these days that they cannot wait for the slow processes of nature, but they fill up and bank up places, like Holland, where they can live; and they keep on exploring and discovering incongruous regions, like Alaska, where they can go and exercise their juvenile exuberance.