as
possible.

We are as apt to borrow trouble from the might-have-beens of our past
life as from any thing else. We mourn over the chances we've missed--the
happiness that eel-like has slipped through our fingers. This is folly;
for generally there are so many ifs in the way, that nearly all the
might-have-beens turn into couldn't-have-beens. Even if they do not, it
is well for us when we don't know them.... The object of our weary
search glides past us like Gabriel past Evangeline, so near, did we only
know it: happy is it for us if we do not, like her, too late learn it;
for

'Of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these--_it might have been!_'

So sad are they, that they would be a suitable refrain to the song of a
lost spirit.

Well, I might have been ----, but am ----

MOLLY O'MOLLY.

IX.

If one wishes to know how barren one's life is of events, the best way
is to try to keep a journal. I tried it in my boarding-school days. With
a few exceptions, the record of one day's outer life was sufficient for
the week; the rest might have been written _ditto, ditto_. Even then,
the events were so trifling that, like entries in a ledger, they might
have been classed as _sundries_. How I tried to get up thoughts and
feelings to make out a decent day's chronicle! How I threw in profound
remarks on what I had read, sketches of character, caricatures of the
teachers, even condescending to give the bill of fare; here, too, there
might have been a great many _dittos_. Had I kept a record of my
dream-life, what a variety there would have been! what extravagances,
exceeded by nothing out of the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_. Then,
if I could have illuminated each day's page with my own fancy portrait
of myself, the _Book of Beauty_ would not have been a circumstance to my
journal. Certainly, among these portraits would not have been that
plain, snub-nosed daguerreotype, sealed and directed to a dear home
friend; but to the dear home friend no picture in the _Book of Beauty_
or my fancy journal would have had such charms; and if the daguerreotype
would not have illuminated this journal, it was itself illuminated _by
the light of a mother's love_. Alas! this light never more can rest on
and irradiate the plain face of Molly O'Molly.

After all, what a dull, monotonous life ours would be, if within this
outer life there were not the inner life, the 'wheel within the wheel,'
as in Ezekiel's vision. Thou