know, my reader, we sympathize the most completely with that which we have ourselves experienced.  And when I hear people talk of a solitary life, the picture called up before me is that of a young man who has always lived as one of a household considerable in numbers, who gets a living in the Church, and who, having no sister to keep house for him, goes to it to live quite alone.  How many of my friends have done precisely that!  Was it not a curious mode of life?  A thing is not made commonplace to your own feeling by the fact that hundreds or thousands of human beings have experienced the very same.  And although fifty Smiths have done it (all very clever fellows), and fifty Robinsons have done it (all very commonplace and ordinary fellows), one does not feel a bit the less interest in recurring to that experience which, hackneyed as it may be, is to you of greater interest than all other experience, in that it is your own.  Draw up a thousand men in a row, all dressed in the same dark-green uniform of the riflemen; and I do not think that their number, or their likeness to one another, will cause any but the most unthinking to forget that each is an individual man as much as if he stood alone in the desert; that each has his own ties, cares, and character, and that possibly each, like to all the rest as he may appear to others, is to several hearts, or perhaps to one only, the one man of all mankind.

Most clergymen whom I have known divide their day very much in the same fashion.  After breakfast they go into their study and write their sermon for two or three hours; then they go out and visit their sick or make other calls of duty for several hours.  If they have a large parish, they probably came to it with the resolution that before dinner they should always have an hour’s smart walk at least; but they soon find that duty encroaches on that hour, and finally eats it entirely up, and their duty calls are continued till it is time to return home to dinner.  Don’t you remember, my friend, how short a time that lonely meal lasted, and how very far from jovial the feast was?  As for me, that I might rest my eyes from reading between dinner and tea (a thing much to be desired in the case of every scholar), I hardly ever, failed, save for a few weeks of midwinter, to go out in the twilight and have a walk—­a solitary and very slow walk.  My hours, you see, were highly unfashionable.  I walked from half-past five to half-past six:  that was my after-dinner walk.  It was always the same.  It looks somewhat dismal to recall.  Do you ever find, in looking back at some great trial or mortification you have passed through, that you are pitying yourself as if you were another person?  I do not mean to say that those walks were a trial.  On the contrary, they were always an enjoyment—­a subdued quiet enjoyment, as are the enjoyments of solitary folk.  Still, now looking back, it seems to me as if I were watching some one else going out in the