How aggravating it is when those who knocked you down kick you for not standing up!  It is not very pleasant to hear that you have been a great fool, that there were fifty ways at least of keeping out of your difficulty, only you had not the sense to see them.  You ought not to have lost the game; even Tom Fool can see where you made a bad move. “He ought to have looked the stable-door;” every body can see that, but nobody offers to buy the loser a new nag. “What a pity he went so far on the ice!” That’s very true, but that won’t save the poor fellow from drowning.  When a man’s coat is threadbare, it is an easy thing to pick a hole in it.  Good advice is poor food for a hungry family.

    “A man of words and not of deeds
    Is like a garden full of weeds.”

Lend me a bit of string to tie up the traces, and find fault with my old harness when I get home.  Help my old horse to a few oats, then tell him to mend his pace.  Feel for me and I shall be much obliged to you, but mind you, feel in your pocket, or else a fig for your feelings.

HOPE.

Eggs are eggs, but some are rotten; and so hopes are hopes, but many of them are delusions.  Hopes are like women, there is a touch of angel about them all, but there are two sorts.  My boy Tom has been blowing a lot of birds’-eggs, and threading them on a string; I have been doing the same thing with hopes, and here’s a few of them, good, bad, and indifferent.

The sanguine man’s hope pops up in a moment like Jack-in-the-box; it works with a spring, and does not go by reason.  Whenever this man looks out of the window he sees better times coming, and although it is nearly all in his own eye and nowhere else, yet to see plum-puddings in the moon is a far more cheerful habit than croaking at every thing like a two-legged frog.  This is the kind of brother to be on the road with on a pitch-dark night, when it pours with rain, for he carries candles in his eyes and a fireside in his heart.  Beware of being misled by him, and then you may safely keep his company.  His fault is that he counts his chickens before they are hatched, and sells his herrings before they are in the net.  All his sparrows’-eggs are bound to turn into thrushes, at the least, if not partridges and pheasants.  Summer has fully come, for he has seen one swallow.  He is sure to make his, fortune at his new shop, for he had not opened the door five minutes before two of the neighbors crowded in; one of them wanted a loaf of bread on trust, and the other asked change for a shilling.  He is certain that the squire means to give him his custom, for he saw him reading the name over the shop door as he rode past.  He does not believe in slips between cups and lips, but makes certainties out of perhapses.  Well, good soul, though he is a little soft at times, there is much in him to praise, and I like to think of ope of his odd sayings, “Never say die till you are dead, and then it’s no use, so let it alone.”  There are other odd people in the world, you see, besides John Ploughman.