Not so for the Commuter. He is compelled to live. I have been reckoning up my inconveniences: the things that I possess; the things I have that are mine; not rented, borrowed, hired, avoided, but claimed, performed, made, owned; that I am burdened with, responsible for; that require my time and my hands. And I find that, for a fairly full life there are inconveniences enough incidental to commuting. To begin with, there is the place of the Commuter’s home. Home? Yes, no doubt, he has a home, but where is it? Can Heaven, besides the Commuter, find out the way there? You are standing with your question at the entrance of the great terminal station as the wintry day and the city are closing, and it is small wonder that you ask if God knows whither, over the maze of tracks reaching out into the night, each of this commuting multitude is going. But follow one, any one of the bundled throng--this one, this tired, fine-faced Scotchman of fifty years whom we chanced to see during the day selling silks behind the counter of a department store. It is a chill November evening, with the meagre twilight already spent. Our Commuter has boarded a train for a nineteen-mile ride; then an electric car for five miles more, when he gets off, under a lone electric light, swinging amid the skeleton limbs of forest trees. We follow him, now on foot, down a road dark with night and overhanging pines, on past a light in a barn, and on--when a dog barks, a horse whinnies, a lantern flares suddenly into the road and comes pattering down at us, calling, “Father! father!” We stop at the gate as father and daughter enter the glowing kitchen. A moment later we hear a cheerful voice greeting the horse, and then, had we gone closer to the barn, we might have heard the creamy tinkle of milk, spattering warm into the bottom of the tin pail. Heaven knew whither, over the reaching rails, this tired seller of silks was going. Heaven was there awaiting him. The yard-stick was laid down at half-past five o’clock; at half-past six by the clock the Commuter was far away, farther than the other side of the world, in his own small barn where they neither sell silk nor buy it, but where they have a loft full of fragrant meadow hay, and keep a cow, and eat their oatmeal porridge with cream. It is an inconvenient world, this distant, darkened, unmapped country of the Commuter. Only God and the Commuter know how to get there, and they alone know why they stay. But there are reasons, good and sufficient reasons--there are inconveniences, I should say, many and compelling inconveniences, such as wife and children, miles in, miles out, the isolation, the chores, the bundles--loads of bundles--that keep the Commuter commuting. Once a commuter, always a commuter, because there is no place along the road, either way, where he can put his bundles down. Bundles, and miles in, and miles out, and isolation, and children, and chores? I will count them all.