you could not make less, you would suddenly stick out one
of your feet, which would hook round his, and he, stumbling over it,
would fall. I trust I am not suggesting a mischievous and dangerous
trick to any boy of the present generation. Indeed, I have the firmest
belief that existing boys know all we used to know, and possibly more.
All this is by way of rendering intelligible what I have to say of my
old companion. He was not a good runner. And when another boy gave him
a sudden flick with a knotted handkerchief, or the like, he had little
chance of catching that other boy. Yet I have often seen him, when
chasing 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