If the Auto-Comrade mislikes the porcupine, however, the feeling is returned with exorbitant interest. The alleged failings of auto-comradeship have always drawn grins, jokes, fleers, and nudges, from the auto-comradeless. It is time the latter should know that the joke is really on him; for he is the most forlorn of mankind. The other is never at a loss. He is invulnerable, being one whom "destiny may not surprise nor death dismay." But the porcupine is liable at any moment to be deserted by associates who are bored by his sharp, hollow quills. He finds himself the victim of a paradox which decrees that the hermit shall "find his crowds in solitude" and never be alone; but that the flocker shall every now and then be cast into inner darkness, where shall be "weeping and gnashing of teeth." The laugh is on the porcupine; but the laugh turns almost into a tear when one stops to realize the nature of his plight. Why, the poor wretch is actually obliged to be near someone else in order to enjoy a sense of vitality! In other words, he needs somebody else to do his living for him. He is a vicarious citizen of the world, holding his franchise only by courtesy of Tom, Dick, and Harry. All the same, it is rather hard to pity him very profoundly while he continues to feel quite as contemptuously superior as he usually does. For, the contempt of the average porcupine for pals of the Auto-Comrade is akin to the contempt which the knights of chivalry felt for those paltry beings who were called clerks because they possessed the queer, unfashionable accomplishment of being able to read and write. I remember that the loudest laugh achieved by a certain class-day orator at college came when he related how the literary guy and the tennis-player were walking one day in the woods, and the literary guy suddenly exclaimed: "Ah, leave me, Louis! I would be alone." Even apart from the stilted language in which the orator clothed the thought of the literary guy, there is, to the porcupine, something irresistibly comic in such a situation. It is to him as though the literary guy had stepped up to the nearest policeman and begged for the room at Sing Sing already referred to. Indeed, the modern porcupine is as suspicious of pals of the Auto-Comrade as the porcupines of the past were of sorcerers and witches--folk, by the way, who probably consorted with spirits no more malign than Auto-Comrades. "What," asked the porcupines of one another, "can they be doing, all alone there in those solitary huts? What honest man would live like that? Ah, they must be up to no good. They must be hand in glove with the Evil One. Well, then, away with them to the stake and the river!"