from you and from his early home, an insignificant item in the bitter price which Britain pays for her Indian Empire.  It is even possible, though you hardly for a moment admit that thought, that the child may turn out a heartless and wicked man, and prove your shame and heartbreak:  all wicked and heartless men have been the children of somebody; and many of them, doubtless, the children of those who surmised the future as little as Eve did when she smiled upon the infant Cain.  And the fireside by which you sit, now merry and noisy enough, may grow lonely,—­lonely with the second loneliness, not the hopeful solitude of youth looking forward, but the desponding loneliness of age looking back.  And it is so with everything else.  Your health may break down.  Some fearful accident may befall you.  The readers of the magazine may cease to care for your articles.  People may get tired of your sermons.  People may stop buying your books, your wine, your groceries, your milk and cream.  Younger men may take away your legal business.  Yet how often these fears prove utterly groundless!  It was good and wise advice, given by one who had managed, with a cheerful and hopeful spirit, to pass through many trying and anxious years, to “take short views":—­not to vex and worry yourself by planning too far ahead.  And a wiser than the wise and cheerful Sydney Smith had anticipated his philosophy.  You remember Who said, “Take no thought”—­that is, no over-anxious and over-careful thought—­“for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.”  Did you ever sail over a blue summer sea towards a mountainous coast, frowning, sullen, gloomy:  and have you not seen the gloom retire before you as you advanced; the hills, grim in the distance, stretch into sunny slopes when you neared them; and the waters smile in cheerful light, that looked so black when they were far away?  And who is there that has not seen the parallel in actual life?  We have all known the anticipated ills of life—­the danger that looked so big, the duty that looked so arduous, the entanglement that we could not see our way through—­prove to have been nothing more than spectres on the far horizon; and when at length we reached them, all their difficulty had vanished into air, leaving us to think what fools we had been for having so needlessly conjured up phantoms to disturb our quiet.  Yes, there is no doubt of it, a very great part of all we suffer in this world is from the apprehension of things that never come.  I remember well how a dear friend, whom I (and many more) lately lost, told me many times of his fears as to what he would do in a certain contingency which both he and I thought was quite sure to come sooner or later.  I know that the anticipation of it caused him some of the most anxious hours of a very anxious, though useful and honored life.  How vain his fears proved!  He was taken from this world before what he had dreaded had cast its most distant shadow.  Well, let me try to discard the notion which has been sometimes worrying me of late, that perhaps I have written nearly as many essays as any one will care to read.  Don’t let any of us give way to fears which may prove to have been entirely groundless.