ood on
rocks. My companion on the rope kept addressing me at critical moments by
the name of Saunders. My name, I rejoice to say, is not Saunders, and he
knew it was not Saunders, but he had to call me something, and in the
excitement of the moment could think of nothing but Saunders. Whenever I
was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian
instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or
lower down. And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it
was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders. I seemed to see him as
a laborious, futile person who would have been better employed at home
looking after his hens. And so in these articles, I seem again to be
impersonating the ineffable Saunders, of whom I feel at liberty to speak
plainly. I see before me a long vista of self-revelations, the real title
of which ought to be "The Showing Up of Saunders."

But to return to the subject. This train-fever is, of course, only a
symptom. It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common
and incurable an affliction. The complaint has been very well satirised by
one who suffered from it. "I have had many and severe troubles in my life,"
he said, "_but most of them never happened_." That is it. We people who
worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative
disaster. The heavens are always going to fall on us. We look ahead, like
Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they
are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest,
but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.

And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless.
Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to
pass, but the things of which we do not dream. The bolt comes from the
blue. We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the
small of the back. We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn
to see Europe in flames. Cowper put the case against all "fearful saints"
(and sinners) when he said:

The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and will break
With blessings on your head.

It is the clouds you don't dread that swamp you. Cowper knew, for he too
was an apprehensive mortal, and it is only the apprehensive mortal who
really knows the full folly of his apprehensiveness.

Now, save once, I have never lost a train