The old who have access to the country often select favorite and generally retired nooks where they can sit for hours and be alone with nature and thus entertain their souls. One old man who did this habitually every summer in a spot in what he called his coign of vantage told me that at each successive year, on revisiting this spot, he was conscious of some deep change, of a certain new sense of closeness to nature’s heart, which, although he could not define it, seemed to mark a new step in his development and which he thought somehow normative for his whole life during the year, for he often went to sleep thinking of the charm of this place, etc. The psychology of solitude, both chosen and enforced, shows that it often brings an almost rapturous delight in the contemplation of some simple object of nature--a flower, shrub, insect or tiny animal, which causes for a moment a kind of temporary focalization that gives it something of a fetishistic power. All this, however, does not lessen but perhaps rather augments, by the law of change and alternation, the growing charm that humanity in the large sense always has for old people who conserve their faculties. The sphinx riddle, what is man and what is the worth and meaning of all his strivings, never fails to come over the matured mind, despite the fact that it is the most baffling and insoluble of all problems, for “age brings a philosophic mind” and with it comes a new realization that the greatest study of mankind is man. _Do you enjoy the society of children, of young people, adults, or those near your own age more or less than formerly?_