on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a
human being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at table to-night the
world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was
focused in the room. What we saw when we looked at one another was not
one another, but one another's world. We were an arrangement of
mirrors. The scenes we saw were all reproduced; the people we met
walked to and fro; they spoke, they bowed, they passed us by, did
everything over again as if it had been real. When we talked, we were
but looking at our own mirror and describing what flitted across it;
our listening was not hearing, but seeing--we but looked on our
neighbor's mirror.
All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I meet a stranger in
a railway carriage. The cadence of his first words tells me he is
English and comes from Yorkshire. Without knowing it he has reflected
his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their race. Even
physiologically he is a mirror. His second sentence records that he is
a politician, and a faint inflection in the way he pronounces _The
Times_ reveals his party. In his next remarks I see reflected a whole
world of experiences. The books he has read, the people he has met,
the companions he keeps, the influences that have played upon him and
made him the man he is--these are all registered there by a pen which
lets nothing pass, and whose writing can