Can any one float in such scenes and be so contentedly idle anywhere in our happy land?  Have we learned yet the simple art of easy enjoyment?  Can we buy it with money quickly, or is it a grace that comes only with long civilization?  Italy, for instance, is full of accumulated wealth, of art, even of ostentation and display, and the new generation probably have lost the power to conceive, if not the skill to execute, the great works which excite our admiration.  Nothing can be much more meretricious than its modern art, when anything is produced that is not an exact copy of something created when there was genius there.  But in one respect the Italians have entered into the fruits of the ages of trial and of failure, and that, is the capacity of being idle with much money or with none, and getting day by day their pay for the bother of living in this world.  It seems a difficult lesson for us to learn in country or city.  Alas! when we have learned it shall we not want to emigrate, as so many of the Italians do?  Some philosophers say that men were not created to be happy.  Perhaps they were not intended to be idle.

IS THERE ANY CONVERSATION

Is there any such thing as conversation?  It is a delicate subject to touch, because many people understand conversation to be talk; not the exchange of ideas, but of words; and we would not like to say anything to increase the flow of the latter.  We read of times and salons in which real conversation existed, held by men and women.  Are they altogether in the past?  We believe that men do sometimes converse.  Do women ever?  Perhaps so.  In those hours sacred to the relaxation of undress and the back hair, in the upper penetralia of the household, where two or three or six are gathered together on and about the cushioned frame intended for repose, do they converse, or indulge in that sort of chat from which not one idea is carried away?  No one reports, fortunately, and we do not know.  But do all the women like this method of spending hour after hour, day after day-indeed, a lifetime?  Is it invigorating, even restful?  Think of the talk this past summer, the rivers and oceans of it, on piazzas and galleries in the warm evenings or the fresher mornings, in private houses, on hotel verandas, in the shade of thousands of cottages by the sea and in the hills!  As you recall it, what was it all about?  Was the mind in a vapid condition after an evening of it?  And there is so much to read, and so much to think about, and the world is so interesting, if you do think about it, and nearly every person has some peculiarity of mind that would be worth study if you could only get at it!  It is really, we repeat, such an interesting world, and most people get so little out of it.  Now there is the conversation of hens, when the hens are busy and not self-conscious; there is something fascinating about it, because the imagination may invest it with a recondite and spicy meaning; but the