It may be mentioned here as a fact to which experience will testify, that such disappointments as that at the railway station and the post-office are most likely to come when you are counting with absolute certainty upon things happening as you wish; when not a misgiving has entered your mind as to your friend’s arriving or your letter coining.  A little latent fear in your soul that you may possibly be disappointed, seems to have a certain power to fend off disappointment, on the same principle on which taking out an umbrella is found to prevent rain.  What you are prepared for rarely happens.  The precise thing you expected comes not once in a thousand times.  A confused state of mind results from long experience of such cases.  Your real feeling often is:  Such a thing seems quite sure to happen; I may say I expect it to happen; and yet I don’t expect it, because I do:  for experience has taught me that the precise thing which I expect, which I think most likely, hardly ever comes.  I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world, which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman who had killed his pig.  It is not a bull; it is a great psychological fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration—­’It did not weigh as much as I expected, and I never thought it would!’

When young ladies tell us that such and such a person ’has met with a disappointment,’ we all understand what is meant.  The phrase, though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy:  it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment which a human being can ever know.  Of course that is an entire mistake.  People get over that disappointment not but what it may leave its trace, and possibly colour the whole of remaining life; sometimes resulting in an unlovely bitterness and hardness of nature; sometimes prolonging even into age a lingering thread of old romance, and keeping a kindly corner in a heart which worldly cares have in great measure deadened.  But the disappointment which has its seat in the affections is outgrown as the affections themselves are outgrown, as the season of their predominance passes away; and the disappointment which sinks the deepest and lasts the longest of all the disappointments which are fanciful rather than material, is that which reaches a man through his ambition and his self-love,—­principles in his nature which outlast the heyday of the heart’s supremacy, and which endure to man’s latest years.  The bitter and the enduring disappointment to most human beings is that which makes them feel, in one way or other, that they are less wise, clever, popular, graceful, accomplished, tall, active, and in short fine, than they had fancied themselves to be.  But it is only to a limited portion of human kind that such words as disappointment and success are