overwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to "sense" the
humanity of the countless human simulacra about us. But we do not stay
where we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow of
Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what
Is usually called happy, one needs only to live.

It cannot be, of course, that we are the only community to discover this
patent fact; but we know no more of the others than they of us. All that
we hear from that part of America which is not Hillsboro is the wild yell
of excitement going up from the great cities, where people seem to be
doing everything that was ever done or thought of except just living. City
dwellers make money, make reputations (good and bad), make museums and
subways, make charitable institutions, make with a hysteric rapidity, like
excited spiders, more and yet more complications in the mazy labyrinths of
their lives, but they never make each others' acquaintances ... and that
is all that is worth doing in the world.

We who live in Hillsboro know that they are to be pitied, not blamed, for
this fatal omission. We realize that only in Hillsboro and places like it
can one have "deep, full life and contact with the vitalizing stream of
humanity." We know that in the very nature of humanity the city is a small
and narrow world, the village a great and wide one, and that the utmost
efforts of city dwellers will not avail to break the bars of the prison
where they are shut in, each with his own kind. They may look out from the
windows upon a great and varied throng, as the beggar munching a crust may
look in at a banqueting hall, but the people they are forced to live with
are exactly like themselves; and that way lies not only monomania but an
ennui that makes the blessing of life savorless.

If this does not seem the plainest possible statement of fact take a