ings that were never to be. In this world, the fact
is for the most part the opposite of what it should be to give force to
Plato's (or Cato's) argument: the thing you vividly anticipate is the
thing that is least likely to come. The thing you don't much care for,
the thing you don't expect, is the likeliest. And even if the event
prove what you anticipated, the circumstances, and the feeling of it,
will be quite different from what you anticipated. A certain little girl
three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her
parents to a certain city, a hundred miles off,--a city which may be
called Altenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her
to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially.
It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee,
and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was
always the same thing. Always, first, how sandwiches would be made,--how
they would all get into the carriage, (which would come round to the
door,) and drive away to a certain railway-station,--how they would get
their tickets, and the train would come up, and they would all get into
a carriage together, and lean back in corners, and eat the sandwiches,
and look out of the windows, and so on. But when the journey was
actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl's
anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made
wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could,
what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But
it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an
entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much,
and with so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with
the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how
fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a
home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which
make up the habitude of being, which we long since resigned ourselves to
knowing could never prove realities! No doubt, it is all right and well.
Even Saint Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to
foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he
would do a certain thing, "so soon as I shall see how it will go with
me."

But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my
reader,