'"
"I only hope that you'll live to grow up yourself, Ferris," said his
entertainer, "you'll certainly be an ornament to your generation. What
a boy you are! I should think you would feel as old as Methuselah by
this time, after having rattled from one place to the next all these
years. Don't you begin to get tired?"
"No, I don't believe I do," replied Dr. Ferris, lending himself to
this new turn of the conversation, but not half satisfied with the
number of his jokes. "I used to be afraid I should, and so I tried to
see everything I could of the world before my enthusiasm began to
cool. And as for rattling to the next place, as you say, you show
yourself to be no traveler by nature, or you wouldn't speak so
slightingly. It is extremely dangerous to make long halts. I could cry
with homesickness at the thought of the towns I have spent more than a
month in; they are like the people one knows; if you see them once,
you go away satisfied, and you can bring them to mind afterward, and
think how they looked or just where it was you met them,--out of doors
or at the club. But if you live with those people, and get fond of
them, and have a thousand things to remember, you get more pain than
pleasure out of it when you go away. And one can't be everywhere at
once, so if you're going to care for things tremendously, you had
better stay in one town altogether. No, give me a week or two, and
then I've something calling me to the next place; somebody to talk
with or a book to see, and off I go.
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