it is after all much like other places, and that our fine romantic view of it was due to some accident of light and colour, some transfiguring mood of our own mind; and then we set out in search of another city which we see crowning a hill on the horizon, and leave the dull place to its own commonplace life.  But to begin with comradeship is to explore the streets and lanes first; and then day by day, as we go up and down in the town, we become aware of its picturesqueness and its charm; we realise that it has an intense and eager life of its own, which we can share as a dweller, though we cannot touch it as a visitor; and so the wonder grows, and the patient love of home.  And we have surprises, too:  we enter a door in a wall that we have not seen before, and we are in a shrine full of fragrant incense-smoke; the fallen day comes richly through stained windows; figures move at the altar, where some holy rite is being celebrated.  The truth is that a friendship cannot be formed in the spirit of a tourist, who is above all in search of the romantic and the picturesque.  Sometimes, indeed, the wandering traveller may become the patient and contented inhabitant; but it is generally the other way, and the best friendships are most often those that seem at first sight dully made for us by habit and proximity, and which reveal to us by slow degrees their beauty and their worth.

* * * * * *

Thus far had I written, when it came into my mind that I should like to see the reflection of my beliefs in some other mind, to submit them to the test of what I may perhaps be forgiven for calling a spirit-level!  And so I read my essay to two wise, kindly, and gracious ladies, who have themselves often indeed graduated in friendship, and taken the highest honours.  I will say nothing of the tender courtesy with which they made their head-breaking balms precious; I told them that I had not finished my essay, and that before I launched upon my last antistrophe, I wanted inspiration.  I cannot here put down the phrases they used, but I felt that they spoke in symbols, like two initiated persons, for whom the corn and the wine and the oil of the sacrifice stand for very secret and beautiful mysteries; but they said in effect that I had been depicting, and not untruly, the outer courts and corridors of friendship.  What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man and a woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in doing so.  We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we could find but one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their bloom.  It came then to this:  that in the emotional region, many women, but very few men, can form the highest kind of tie; and we agreed that men tended to find what they needed in marriage,