And what is at the base of our sympathy and interest? Nothing but our common life. They, too,--all the glad or sorrowing children of imaginative literature from Helen of Troy to Helena Richie--are travelers like ourselves on the great highway. We know well how difficult a road it is, how rough, how steep, how dangerous, how boggy, how lined with pitfalls, how bordered with gardens of deadly delights, how beset by bandits, how noisy with fakirs, how overhung with poisonous fruit and swept by devastating storms. We know also what stretches of happiness are there, what days of friendship, what hours of love, what sane enjoyment, what rapturous content. How should we not, then, be interested in all that goes by upon that great road? We like to sit at our comfortable windows, when the fire is alight or the summer air is soft, and "watch the pass," as they say in Nantucket,--what our neighbours are about, and what strangers are in town. If we live in a small community, there is the monotony of our daily routine to be relieved. When an unknown figure passes down the street, we may enjoy the harmless excitement of novelty and taste something of the keen savour of adventure. If we are dwellers in a great city, where every passer is unknown, there is still the discoverer's zest in larger measure; every moment is great with possibility; every face in the throng holds its secret; every figure is eloquent of human drama. The pageant is endless, its story never finished. Who, indeed, could not be spellbound, beholding that countless changing tatterdemalion caravan go by? Yet all we may hope for of the inner history of these journeying beings, so humanly amazing, so significant, and all moved like ourselves by springs of joy and fear, hope and discouragement, is a glimpse here and there, a life-story revealed in a single gesture, a tragic history betrayed in the tone of a voice or the lifting of a hand, or perhaps a heaven of gladness in a glancing smile. For the most part their orbits are as aloof from us as the courses of the stars, potent and mystic manifestations of the divine, glowing puppets of the eternal masked in a veil of flesh. This was the pomp of history which held the mind of Shakespeare, of Dickens, of Cervantes, of Balzac, in thrall, and drew the inquiring eye of Browning and Whitman, of Stevenson and Borrow, with so charmed and comprehending a look. To understand and set down faithfully some small portion of the tale of this ever changing procession, which is for ever appearing over the sunrise hills of to-morrow and passing into the twilight valleys of yesterday, is the engrossing task of the novelist and the teller of tales.