apart are the lonely figures he has seen in desert places there.  Their loneliness is broken by his passage, it is true, but hardly so to them.  They look at him, but they are not aware that he looks at them.  Nay, they look at him as though they were invisible.  Their un-self-consciousness is absolute; it is in the wild degree.  They are solitaries, body and soul; even when they are curious, and turn to watch the passer-by, they are essentially alone.  Now, no one ever found that attitude in a squire’s figure, or that look in any country gentleman’s eyes.  The squire is not a life-long solitary.  He never bore himself as though he were invisible.  He never had the impersonal ways of a herdsman in the remoter Apennines, with a blind, blank hut in the rocks for his dwelling.  Millet would not even have taken him as a model for a solitary in the briefer and milder sylvan solitudes of France.  And yet nothing but a life-long, habitual, and wild solitariness would be quite proportionate to a park of any magnitude.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.  It is the London expression, and, in its way, the Paris expression.  It is the quickly caught, though not interested, look, the dull but ready glance of those who do not know of their forfeited place apart; who have neither the open secret nor the close; no reserve, no need of refuge, no flight nor impulse of flight; no moods but what they may brave out in the street, no hope of news from solitary counsels.

DECIVILIZED

The difficulty of dealing—­in the course of any critical duty—­with decivilized man lies in this:  when you accuse him of vulgarity—­sparing him no doubt the word—­he defends himself against the charge of barbarism.  Especially from new soil—­remote, colonial—­he faces you, bronzed, with a half conviction of savagery, partly persuaded of his own youthfulness of race.  He writes, and recites, poems about ranches and canyons; they are designed to betray the recklessness of his nature and to reveal the good that lurks in the lawless ways of a young society.  He is there to explain himself, voluble, with a glossary for his own artless slang.  But his colonialism is only provincialism very articulate.  The new air does but make old decadences seem more stale; the young soil does but set into fresh conditions the ready-made, the uncostly, the refuse feeling of a race decivilizing.  He who played long this pattering part of youth, hastened to assure you with so self-denying a face he did not wear war-paint and feathers, that it became doubly difficult to communicate to him that you had suspected him of nothing wilder than a second-hand (figurative) dress coat.  And when it was a question not of rebuke, but of praise, even the American was ill-content with the word of the judicious who lauded him for