I will not close this preface without saying that the happiness of sympathetic human intercourse seems to me incomparably greater than any other pleasure. I may be supposed to have passed the age of enthusiastic illusions, yet I would at any time rather pass a week with a real friend in any place that afforded simple shelter than with an indifferent person in a palace. In saying this I am thinking of real experiences. One of my friends who is devoted to archæological excavations has often invited me to share his life in a hut or a cottage, and I have invariably found that the pleasure of his society far overbalanced the absence of luxury. On the other hand, I have sometimes endured extreme _ennui_ at sumptuous feasts in richly appointed houses. The result of experience, in my case, has been to confirm a youthful conviction that the value of certain persons is not to be estimated by comparison with anything else. I was always a believer, and am so at this day more than ever, in the happiness of genuine human intercourse, but I prefer solitude to the false imitation of it. It is in this as in other pleasures, the better we appreciate the real thing, the less we are disposed to accept the spurious copy as a substitute. By far the greater part of what passes for human intercourse is not intercourse at all, but only acting, of which the highest object and most considerable merit is to conceal the weariness that accompanies its hollow observances. One sad aspect of my subject has not been touched upon in this volume. It was often present in my thoughts, but I timidly shrank from dealing with it. I might have attempted to show in what manner intercourse is cut short by death. All reciprocity of intercourse is, or appears to be, entirety cut short by that catastrophe; but those who have talked with us much in former years retain an influence that may be even more constant than our recollection of them. My own recollection of the dead is extremely vivid and clear, and I cultivate it by willingly thinking about them, being especially happy when by some accidental flash of brighter memory a more than usual degree of lucidity is obtained. I accept with resignation the natural law, on the whole so beneficent, that when an organism is no longer able to exist without suffering, or senile decrepitude, it should be dissolved and made insensible of suffering; but I by no means accept the idea that the dead are to be forgotten in order that we may spare ourselves distress. Let us give them their due place, their great place, in our hearts and in our thoughts; and if the sweet reciprocity of human intercourse is no longer possible with those who are silent and asleep, let the memory of past intercourse be still a part of our lives. There are hours when we live with the dead more than with the living, so that without any trace of superstition we feel their old sweet influence acting upon us yet, and it seems as if only a little more were needed to give us