to find himself no more than one of a large circle, no member of which is disposed to pay any special regard to his judgment, or in any way to yield him precedence.  And the young man who has come in his solitary dwelling to think that he is no ordinary mortal, has that nonsense taken out of him when he goes back to spend some days in his father’s house among a lot of brothers of nearly his own age, who are generally the very last of the race to believe in any man.  But sometimes the opposite effect comes of the lonely life.  You grow anxious, nervous, and timid; you lose confidence in yourself, in the absence of any who may back up your failing sense of your own importance.  You would like to shrink into a corner, and to slip quietly through life unnoticed.  And all this without affectation, without the least latent feeling that perhaps you are not so very insignificant after all.  Yet, even where men have come well to understand how infinitely little they are as regards the estimation of mankind, you will find them, if they live alone, cherishing some vain fancy that some few people, some distant friends, are sometimes thinking of them.  You will find them arranging their papers, as though fancying that surely somebody would like some day to see them; and marshalling their sermons, as though in the vague notion that at some future time mortals would be found weak enough to read them.  It is one of the things slowly learnt by repeated lessons and lengthening experience, that nobody minds very much about you, my reader.  You remember the sensitive test which Dr. Johnson suggested as to the depth of one mortal’s feeling for another.  How does it affect his appetite?  Multitudes in London, he said, professed themselves extremely distressed at the hanging of Dr. Dodd; but how many on the morning he was hung took a materially worse breakfast than usual?  Solitary dreamer, fancying that your distant friends feel deep interest in your goings-on, how many of them are there who would abridge their dinner if the black-edged note arrived by post which will some day chronicle the last fact in your worldly history?

You get, living alone, into little particular ways of your own.  You know how, walking along a crowded street, you cannot keep a straight line:  at every step you have to yield a little to right or left to avoid the passers by.  This is no great trouble:  you do it almost unconsciously, and your journey is not appreciably lengthened.  Even so, living in a family, walking along the path of life in the same track with many more, you find it needful scores of times each day to give up your own fancies and wishes and ways, in deference to those of others.  You cannot divide the day in that precise fashion which you would yourself like best.  You must, in deciding what shall be the dinner-hour, regard what will suit others as well as you.  You cannot sit always just in the corner or in the chair you would prefer.  Sometimes you must tell your children a story when