another, before finally abandoning the pursuit, stick out his foot in the regular way, though the boy he was chasing was yards beyond his reach.  Often did the present writer meditate on that phenomenon, in the days of his boyhood.  It appeared curious that it should afford some comfort to the evaded pursuer, to make an offer at upsetting the escaping youth,—­an offer which could not possibly be successful.  But very often, in after-life, have I beheld in the conduct of grown-up men and women the moral likeness of that futile sticking-out of the foot.  I have beheld human beings who lived in houses always untidy and disorderly, or whose affairs were in a horrible confusion and entanglement, who now and then seemed roused to a a feeling that this would not do, who querulously bemoaned their miserable lot, and made some faint and futile attempt to set things right, attempts which never had a chance to succeed, and which ended in nothing.  Yet it seemed somehow to pacify the querulous heart.  I have known a clergyman, in a parish with a bad population, seem suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must do something to mend matters, and set agoing some weak little machinery, which could produce no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in a few weeks.  Yet that faint offer appeared to discharge the claims of conscience, and after it the clergyman remained long time in a comatose state of unhealthy Resignation.  But it is a miserable and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in that man who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in the presence of a recognized evil.  Such a man may be in a sense resigned, but, he cannot possibly be content.

If you should ever, when you have reached middle age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in the hopeful though foolish days when you were eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been taught you.  You would have got into a terrible state of excitement, if any one had told you then that you would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time; and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that in not many years you would not care a single straw for the things and the persons who were then uppermost in your mind and heart.  What an entirely new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you! and how completely the old ones are gone:  gone, like the sunsets you remember in the summers of your childhood; gone, like the primroses that grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy!  Said my friend Smith to me, a few days ago:  “You remember Miss Jones, and all about that?  I met her yesterday, after ten years.  She is a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman.  What a terrific fool I was!” Smith spoke to me in the confidence of friendship; yet I think he was a little mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his former folly.  He had got over it completely; and