superfluous to add that if our constitutional mental tendency be that of the gentleman who naïvely expressed his feelings by saying impressively to a friend, “I take _great_ interest in my own concerns, I _assure_ you I do,” it seems doubly desirable that we should overstep our petty ring-fence of personal hopes, fears, and emotions of all kinds, and roam with our neighbors over their dominions, and into further outlying regions of public and universal interest. Of all ingenious prescriptions for making a miserable moral hypochondriac, it is difficult to imagine a better than the orthodox plan of the “Selig-gemachende Kirche” for making a Saint. Take your man or woman, with a morbidly tender conscience and a pernicious habit of self-introspection. If he or she have an agonizing memory of wrong, sin, or sorrow overshadowing the whole of life, so much the better. Then shut the individual up in a cell like a toad in a stone, to feed on his or her own thoughts, till death or madness puts an end to the experiment. But if the seaside and solitude and the midnight couch have been much overrated as propitious conditions of thought, there are, _per contra_, certain other conditions of it the value of which has been too much ignored. The law of the matter seems to be that real hard Thought, like Happiness, rarely comes when we have made elaborate preparation for it; and that the higher part of the mind which is to be exercised works much more freely when a certain lower part (concerned with “unconscious cerebration”) is busy about some little affairs of its own department and its restless activity is thus disposed of. Not one man in fifty does his best thinking quite motionless, but instinctively employs his limbs in some way when his brain is in full swing of argument and reflection. Even a trifling fidget of the hands with a paper-knife, a flower, a piece of twine, or the bread we crumble beside our plate at dinner, supplies in a degree this _desideratum_, and the majority of people never carry on an animated conversation involving rapid thought without indulging in some such habit. But the more complete employment of our unconscious cerebration in walking up or down a level terrace or quarter-deck, where there are no passing objects to distract our attention and no need to mark where we plant our feet, seems to provide even better for smooth-flowing thought. The perfection of such conditions is attained when the walk in question is taken of a still, soft November evening, when the light has faded so far as to blur the surrounding withered trees and flowers, but the gentle gray sky yet affords enough vision to prevent embarrassment. There are a few such hours in every year which appear absolutely invaluable for calm reflection, and which are grievously wasted by those who hurry indoors at dusk to light candles and sit round a yet unneeded fire.