which though precariously poised, arrested his fall; and he hung
there for some hours in mortal anguish, not daring to move,
clinging to a tuft of heather, shouting at intervals, in the hope
that, when he did not return home, a search-party might be sent out
to look for him. At last he heard, to his intense relief, the sound
of voices hailing him, and presently the gleam of lanterns shot
through the mist. He uttered agonising cries, and the rescuers were
soon at his side; when he found that he had been lying in a shaft
which had been filled up, and that the firm ground was about a foot
below him; and that, in fact, if the stone that supported him had
given way, he would have been spared a long period of almost
intolerable horror.

It is a good parable of many of our disquieting fears and
anxieties; as Lord Beaconsfield said, the greatest tragedies of his
life had been things that never happened; Carlyle truly and
beautifully said that the reason why the past always appeared to be
beautiful, in retrospect, was that the element of fear was absent
from it. William Morris said a trenchant thing on the same subject.
He attended a Socialist Meeting of a very hostile kind, which he
anticipated with much depression. When some one asked him how the
meeting had gone off he said, "Well, it was fully as damnable as I
had expected--a thing which seldom happens." A good test of the
happiness of anyone's life is to what extent he has had trials to
bear which are unbearable even to recollect. I am myself of a
highly imaginative and anxious temperament, and I have had many
hours of depression at the thought of some unpleasant anticipation
or disagreeable contingency, and I can honestly say that nothing
has ever been so bad, when it actually occurred, as it had
represented itself to me beforehand. There are a few incidents in