And when this foolish little romance, which had taken nebulous outline in the fancy of Colonel Prowley, suddenly fell at his feet a serious indubitability, the dear, delighted old gentleman was the first to declare, that, as our engagement had existed for the last seventy years, it certainly did not seem worth while to wait much longer.  At all events, we did not wait longer than the following Thanksgiving; since which period my experience leads me to declare, that, if the Miss Hurribattle of my great-great-uncle’s day was at all comparable to the member of her family I met at Foxden, my respected relative made a great mistake in living a bachelor.

RESIGNATION.

You know how a little child of three or four years old kicks and howls, if it do not get its own way.  You know how quietly a grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out otherwise than he wished.  A letter, a newspaper, a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morning on which it had been particularly wished for, and counted on with certainty.  The day proves rainy, when a fine day was specially desirable.  The grown-up man is disappointed; but he soon gets reconciled to the existing state of facts.  He did not much expect that things would turn out as he wished them.  Yes:  there is nothing like the habit of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it quietly.  And a habit of practical resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life.

You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some lingering remains of respectability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by; and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away:  too beaten and sick at heart for energy; drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world.  You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a certain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him something.  I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there:  for, though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging.  Hundreds of times in the long day, he must see people approaching, and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny, and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass without noticing him.  It must be a hard school of Resignation.  Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into bearing one disappointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of heart.  But, on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear, if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blaspheming even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which were of course