Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/197

 the way around wooden horses and to look all gift horses in the mouth. They are cultivating in themselves and in a pretty thick stratum of the great democratic reading public a Missourian temper of inquiry about some of the Big Constructive Thinking, a lenity and amused tolerance toward even the painful virtues of their neighbors, and a quiet self-possession (recall Mr. Holliday's observation that the President had "no pin to his tie")—a quiet self-possession and an ability to relish one's "daily bread" amid all the pomps and splendors and indignities of the human lot.

They tend to make the stranger at home in the world, and the lonely and insignificant man in town or country, who talks with no one morning, noon or night, feel yet, as he opens his paper, that he is not the only one of his kind, but that he is neighboured on all sides by his kindred and that in farmhouse and town mansion and White House there are millions of other strangers, essentially as lonely and insignificant as he. This is, perhaps, as near to a homelike feeling as a man can expect to come in this world.