How to Do It

by Edward Everett Hale

First, we can think. And there are some places where we can do nothing else. In a railway carriage, for instance, on a rainy or a frosty day, you cannot see the country. If you are without companions, you cannot talk,--ought not, indeed, talk much, if you had them. You ought not read, because reading in the train puts your eyes out, sooner or later. You cannot write. And in most trains the usages are such that you cannot sing. Or, when they sing in trains, the whole company generally sings, so that rules for solitude no longer apply.

What can you do then? You can think. Learn to think carefully, regularly, so as to think with pleasure.

I know some young people who had two or three separate imaginary lives, which they took up on such occasions. One was a supposed life in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Robert used to plan the whole house and grounds; just what horses he would keep, what hounds, what cows, and other stock. He planned all the neighbors' houses, and who should live in them. There were the Fairfaxes, very nice, but rather secesh; and the Sydneys, who had been loyal through and through. There was that plucky Frank Fairfax, and that pretty Blanche Sydney. Then there were riding parties, archery parties, picnics on the river, expeditions to the Natural Bridge, and once a year a regular "meet" for a fox-hunt.

"Springfield, twenty-five minutes for refreshments," says the conductor, and Robert is left to take up his history some other time.

It is a very good plan to have not simply stories on hand, as he had, but to be ready to take up the way to plan your garden, the arrangement of your books, the order of next year's Reading Club, or any other truly good subjects which have been laid by for systematic thinking, the first time you are alone. Bear this in mind as you read. If you had been General Sullivan, at the battle of Brandywine, you are not quite certain whether you would have done as he did. No. Well, then, keep that for a nut to crack the first time you have to be alone. What would you have done?

This matter of being prepared to think is really a pretty important matter, if you find some night that you have to watch with a sick friend. You must not read, write, or talk there. But you must keep awake. Unless you mean to have the time pass dismally slow, you must have your regular topics to think over, carefully and squarely.

An imaginary conversation, such as Madame de Genlis describes, is an excellent resource at such a time.

Many and many a time, as I have been grinding along at night on some railway in the Middle States, when it was too early to sleep, and too late to look at the scenery, have I called into imaginary council a circle of the nicest people in the world.

"Let me suppose," I would say to myself, "that we were all at Mrs. Tileston's in the front parlor, where the light falls so beautifully, on the laughing face and shoulder of that Bacchante. Let me suppose that besides Mrs. Tileston, Edith was there, and Emily and Carrie and Haliburton and Fred. Suppose just then the door-bell rang, and Mr. Charles Sumner came up stairs fresh from Washington. What should we all say and do?

"Why, of course we should be glad to see him, and we should ask him about Washington and the Session,--what sort of a person Lady Bruce was,--and whether it was really true that General Butler said that bright thing about the Governor of Arkansas.