Introduction
home, his old friends, and his old land; and, now and gain, his awful loneliness and dereliction overwhelm him with black horror. His little room is as a condemned cell, and if he goes out into the streets, there are the more terrible multitudes of the unknown; the lamplit crowds that remind him of the dark throngs that Dante saw below in torment, that go to and fro and hurry hither and thither without end or purpose or hope.
How gain some little drop of water of relief in such pains as these? The young man solved the problem by writing the aforesaid "Anatomy of Tobacco." Sad stuff, as I have said, but that is not the point. The point is that we are infinitely various; and here is an instance of a very distinct way out of a very common difficulty. Every lonely young man of twenty has his own individual solution for the problem; and here was mine. Life was made at worst endurable, and at best enjoyable—in a grim sort of way.
And it was probably the only solution—for me. I have said something of a mind
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