is health.

CHAPTER XII.

LIKE THE POOR CAT I' THE ADAGE.

Wishing will do nothing. If a man has sufficient cause for action
he should act. "Letting I dare not wait upon I would, Like the poor
cat i' the adage," never can produce results. Cherries will not fall
into your mouth without picking. "If it were done, when 'tis done
then 'twere well it were done quickly." If grapes hang too high
what is the use of thinking of them? Nevertheless,--"Where there's
a will there's a way." But certainly no way will be found amidst
difficulties, unless a man set himself to work seriously to look
for it. With such self-given admonitions, counsels, and tags of old
quotations as these, Mr. Greenwood went to work with himself on
Monday night, and came to a conclusion that if anything were to be
done it must be done at once.

Then came the question--what was the thing to be done, and what at
once meant? When a thing has to be done which requires a special
summoning of resolution, it is too often something which ought not
to be done. To virtuous deeds, if they recommend themselves to us
at all, we can generally make up our minds more easily. It was
pleasanter to Mr. Greenwood to think of the thing as something in the
future, as something which might possibly get itself done for him by
accident, than as an act the doing of which must fall into his own
hands. Then came the "cat i' the adage," and the "when 'tis done then
'twere well," and the rest of it. Thursday morning, between four and
five o' clock, when it would be pitch dark, with neither star nor
moon in the heavens, when Lord Hampstead would certainly be alone in
a certain spot, unattended and easily assailable;--would Thursday
morning be the fittest time for any such deed as that which he had
now in truth began to contemplate?

When the thing presented itself to him in this new form, he recoiled
from it. It cannot be said that Mr. Greenwood was a man of any strong
religious feelings. He had been ordained early in life to a curacy,
having probably followed, in choosing his profession, the bent given
to him by his family connections, and had thus from circumstances
fallen into the household of his present patron's uncle. From that to
this he had never performed a service in a church, and his domestic
services as chaplain had very soon become nothing.

The old Lord Kingsbury had died very soon afterwards, and Mr.
Greenwood's services had been continued rather as private