d to mention, but I find myself oppressed with anxiety
for weeks beforehand as to whether, when we get to Calais, we shall
find places in the train." And I remember, too, how a woman friend of
mine once told me that she called at the house of an elderly couple in
London, people of rank and wealth. Their daughter met her in the
drawing-room and said, "I am glad you are come--you may be able to
cheer my mother up. We are going down to-morrow to our place in the
country; the servants and the luggage went this morning, and my mother
and father are to drive down this afternoon--my mother is very low
about it." "What is the matter?" said my friend. The daughter replied,
"She is afraid that they will not get there in time!" "In time for
what?" said my friend, thinking that there was some important
engagement. "In time for tea!" said the daughter gravely.

It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not natural
fears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are the symptoms
and not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of mind of the
sluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the way." Younger
people are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful creating of
apprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and reassuring, and
compassionate to the weakness of nerve for which it stands.

With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the
less distressing fears about health which beset people all their lives,
in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to find a man
reduced to depression and silence at the possibility of taking cold, or
at the fear of having eaten something unwholesome. I remember an
elderly gentleman who had lived a vigorous and unselfish life, and was
indeed a man of force and character, whose activity was entirely
suspended in later years by his fear of catching cold or of over-tiring
himself. He was a country clergyman, and used to spend the whole of
Sunday between his services, in solitary seclusion, "resting," and
retire to bed the moment the evening service was over; moreover his
dread of taking cold was such that he invariably wore a hat in the
winter months to go from the drawing-room to the dining-room for
dinner, even if there were guests in his house. He used to jest about
it, and say that it no doubt must look curious; but he added that he
had found it a wise precaution, and that we had no idea how disabling
his colds were. Even a very heal