you do as regards greater men: you add your lot to your personality,
and thus you make up a bigger object. And when you see yourself in your
tailor's shop, in a large mirror (one of a series) wherein you see your
figure all round, reflected several times, your feeling will probably
be, What a little thing you are! If you are a wise man, you will go away
somewhat humbled, and possibly somewhat the better for the sight. You
have, to a certain extent, done what Burns thought it would do all men
much good to do: you have "seen yourself as others see you." And even
to do so physically is a step towards a juster and humbler estimate of
yourself in more important things. It may here be said, as a further
illustration of the principle set forth, that people who stay very much
at home feel their stature, bodily and mental, much lessened when they
go far away from home, and spend a little time among strange scenes and
people. For, going thus away from home, you take only yourself. It is
but a small part of your extension that goes. You go; but you leave
behind your house, your study, your children, your servants, your
horses, your garden. And not only do you leave them behind, but they
grow misty and unsubstantial when you are far away from them. And
somehow you feel, that, when you make the acquaintance of a new friend
some hundreds of miles off, who never saw your home and your family, you
present yourself before him only a twentieth part or so of what you feel
yourself to be when you have all your belongings about you. Do you not
feel all that? And do you not feel, that, if you were to go away to
Australia forever, almost as the English coast turned blue and then
invisible on the horizon, your life in England would first turn
cloud-like, and then melt away?

But without further discussing the philosophy of how it comes to be, I
return to the statement that you yourself, as you live in your home, are
to yourself the centre of this world,--and that you feel the force of