e the cynic loses himself in laughter.
That is all he knows about it, and it merely supplies us with another
evidence of the superficiality of cynicism. The critic is sometimes
right, but the cynic is never right; and the roar of laughter that I
hear from the cynic's chair, as he talks about bites, is, therefore,
rightly translated and interpreted, a kind of thunderous applause.
Why, in some respects, a bite is better than a fish. Only very
occasionally does a fish look as well on the bank or in the boat as it
appeared to the excited imagination of the angler when he first felt
the flutter on the line. I have caught thousands of fish in my time;
but most of them I have dismissed from memory as soon as they went
flapping into the basket. But some of the bites that I have had! I
catch myself wondering now what beauteous monsters they can have been.

'Well, and how many did you catch?' I am regularly asked on my return.

'Oh, a couple of dozen or so; but, oh, I had such a bite! . . .'

And so on. It is the bite that lingers fondly in the memory, that
haunts the fancy for days afterwards, and that rushes back upon the
angler in his dreams.

'Oh, I've lost him!' one of my companions called out from the other end
of the boat this afternoon. 'He got off the line just after I started
to draw him in; such a lovely bite; I'm sure it was the biggest fish
we've had round here this afternoon!'

Of course it was! The bite is always the biggest fish. There is
something very charming--something of which the cynic knows nothing at
all--about this propensity of ours to attribute superlative qualities
to the unrealized. It is a species of philosophic chivalry. It is a
courtesy that we extend to the unknown. We do not know whether the
joys that never visited us were really great or small, so we gallantly
allow them the benefit of the doubt. The geese that came waddling over
the hill are geese, all of them, and as geese we write them down; but
the geese that never came over the hill are swans every one, and no
swans that we have fed beside the lake glided hither and thither half
as gracefully.

A young girl comes to my study. She is tall and comely, and her face
reveals a quiet beauty. But she is dressed in black, and the marks of
a great sorrow are stamped upon her pale, drawn countenance. My heart
goes out to her as she tells her story. It was so entirely unexpected,
so totally unthought of, this sudden loss of her