COMMUTER'S THANKSGIVING 229 



upon life as when one has it done into a bundle ? 

 Life is never so tangible, never so compact and 

 satisfactory as while still wrapped up and tied 

 with a string. One's clothes, to take a single ex- 

 ample, as one bears them home in a box, are an 

 anticipation and a pure joy — the very clothes 

 that, the next day, one wears as a matter of course, 

 or wears with disconcerting self-consciousness, or 

 wears, it may be, with physical pain. 



Here are the Commuter's weary miles. Life to 

 everybody is a good deal of a journey; to nobody 

 so little of a journey, however, as to the Com- 

 muter, for his traveling is always bringing him 

 home. 



And as to his isolation and his chores it is just 

 the same, because they really have no separate 

 existence save in the urban mind, as hydrogen 

 and oxygen have no separate existence save in 

 the corked flasks of the laboratory. These gases 

 are found side by side nowhere in nature. Only 

 water is to be found free in the clouds and springs 

 and seas — only the union of hydrogen and oxy- 

 gen, because it is part of the being of these two 

 elements to combine. So is it the nature of chores 

 and isolation to combine — into water, like hydro- 



