rotted away, and it had been no one's business to see that it
was renewed--some few had been filled up, but many of them were
hundreds of feet deep, and entirely unguarded. The farmer first missed
the track, and after long wandering found himself at last among the
shafts. He sate down, knowing the extreme danger of his situation, and
resolved to wait till the morning; but it became so cold that he dared
stay no longer, for fear of being frozen alive, and with infinite
precautions he tried to make his way out of the dangerous region,
following the downward slope of the ground. In spite, however, of all
his care, he found suddenly, on putting his foot down, that he was on
the edge of a shaft, and that his foot was dangling in vacancy. He
threw himself backwards, but too late, and he slid down several feet,
grasping at the grass and heather; his foot fortunately struck against
a large stone, which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and
he hung there for some hours in mortal anguish, not daring to move,
clinging to a tuft of heather, shouting at intervals, in the hope that,
when he did not return home, a search-party might be sent out to look
for him. At last he heard, to his intense relief, the sound of voices
hailing him, and presently the gleam of lanterns shot through the mist.
He uttered agonising cries, and the rescuers were soon at his side;
when he found that he had been lying in a shaft which had been filled
up, and that the firm ground was about a foot below him; and that, in
fact, if the stone that supported him had given way, he would have been
spared a long period of almost intolerable horror.

It is a good parable of many of our disquieting fears and anxieties; as
Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his life had been
things that never happened; Carlyle truly and beautifully said that the
reason why the past always appeared to be beautiful, in retrospect, was
that the element of fear was absent from it. William Morris said a
trenchant thing on the same subject. He attended a Socialist Meeting of
a very hostile kind, which he anticipated with much depression. When
some one asked him how the meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was
fully as damnable as I had expected--a thing which seldom happens." A
good test of the happiness of anyone's life is to what extent he has
had trials to bear which are unbearable even to recollect. I am myself
of a highly imaginative and anxious temperament,