During the summer, many artists come in quest of rest or an industrious solitude. They are the ones who really enjoy and appreciate more than any one else the strange, sweet charm of this little provincial town, where every house has its garden, and every garden its flowers; where the peaceful days go by with a slow and regular rhythm, and the silence is broken only by the sound of the angelus or the ring of the blacksmith’s anvil. The one noisy time in the week is market-day, when the throngs of covered wagons, drawn by strong cart-horses, the peasant women in their white caps and the men in their blue blouses bringing in cattle, poultry, fruit, and vegetables, make a lively and attractive scene; when the air is full of the crack of whips and the tinkle of bells, and gay with songs, cries, and laughter. But it may not be long before the country carts will give way to automobiles, the white caps to beflowered hats, and the blouses to jackets of the latest cut. THE AUTO-COMRADE BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER Author of “Romantic Germany,” “Romantic America,” etc. Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum inside itself. Offer the ordinary man a week’s vacation all alone, and he will look as though you were offering him a cell in Sing Sing. “There are a great many people,” says that wise and popular oracle, Ruth Cameron, “to whom there is no prospect more terrifying than that of a few hours with only their own selves for company. To escape that terrible catastrophe, they will make friends with the most fearful bore or read the most stupid story.... If such people are marooned a few hours, not only without human companionship, but even without a book or magazine with which to screen their own stupidity from themselves, they are fairly frantic.” If any one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it this epitaph: “Here lies the pod. The Pease are shelled and gone to God.” Now, pod-like people are always solitary wherever other people are not; and there is, of course, nothing much more distressing than solitariness. These people, however, through sheer ignorance, fall into a confusion of thought. They suppose that solitude and solitariness are the same thing. To the artist in life there is just one difference between these two: it is the difference between heaven and its antipodes. For, to the artist in life, solitude is solitariness plus the Auto-comrade.