Yes:  there is a good deal of practical resignation in this world.  We get reconciled to having and to being screws.  We grow reconciled to the fact that our possessions, our relations, our friends, are very far indeed from being what we could wish.  We grow reconciled to the fact, and we try to make the best of it, that we ourselves are screws:  that in temper, in judgment, in talent, in tact, we are a thousand miles short of being what we ought; and that we can hope for little more than decently, quietlv, sometimes wearily and sadly, to plod along the path in life which God in his kindness and wisdom has set us.  We come to look with interest, but without a vestige of envy, at those who are cleverer and better off than ourselves.  A great many good people are so accustomed to things going against them, that they are rather startled when things go as they could have desired:  they can stand disappointment, but success puts them out, it is so unwonted a thing.  The lame horse, the battered old gig,—­they feel at home with these; but they would be confused if presented with my friend Smith’s drag, with its beautiful steeds, all but thoroughbred, and perfectly sound.  To struggle on with a small income, manifold worries, and lowly estimation,—­to these things they have quietly reconciled themselves.  But give them wealth, and peace, and fame (if these things can be combined), and they would hardly know what to do.  Yesterday I walked up a very long flight of steps in a very poor part of the most beautiful city in Britain.  Just before me, a feeble old woman, bent down apparently by eighty years, was slowly ascending.  She had a very large bundle on her back, and she supported herself by a short stick in her withered, trembling hand.  If it had been in the country, I should most assuredly have carried up the poor creature’s bundle for her; but I am sorry to say I had not moral courage to offer to do so in town:  for a parson with a great sackcloth bundle on his back, would be greeted in that district with depreciatory observations.  But I kept close by her, to help her if she fell; and when I got to the top of the steps I passed her and went on.  I looked sharply at the poor old face in passing; I see it yet.  I see the look of cowed, patient, quiet, hopeless submission:  I saw she had quite reconciled her mind to bearing her heavy burden, and to the far heavier load of years, and infirmities, and poverty, she was bearing too.  She had accepted those for her portion in this life.  She looked for nothing better.  She was like the man whose horse has been broken-winded and lame so long, that he has come almost to think that every horse is a screw.  I see yet the quiet, wearied, surprised look she cast up at me as I passed:  a look merely of surprise to see an entire coat in a place where my fellow-creatures (every one deserving as much as me) for the most part wear rags.  I do not think she even wished to possess an equally entire garment:  she looked at it with interest merely as the possession of some one else.  She did not even herself (as we Scotch say) to anything better than the rags she had worn so long.  Long experience had subdued her to what she is.