It reminds me of an occasion on which I was climbing with a famous rock climber.  I do not mind confessing (over my pen name) that I am not good on rocks.  My companion on the rope kept addressing me at critical moments by the name of Saunders.  My name, I rejoice to say, is not Saunders, and he knew it was not Saunders, but he had to call me something, and in the excitement of the moment could think of nothing but Saunders.  Whenever I was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or lower down.  And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders.  I seemed to see him as a laborious, futile person who would have been better employed at home looking after his hens.  And so in these articles, I seem again to be impersonating the ineffable Saunders, of whom I feel at liberty to speak plainly.  I see before me a long vista of self-revelations, the real title of which ought to be “The Showing Up of Saunders.”

But to return to the subject.  This train-fever is, of course, only a symptom.  It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common and incurable an affliction.  The complaint has been very well satirised by one who suffered from it.  “I have had many and severe troubles in my life,” he said, “but most of them never happened.”  That is it.  We people who worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative disaster.  The heavens are always going to fall on us.  We look ahead, like Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest, but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.

And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless.  Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to pass, but the things of which we do not dream.  The bolt comes from the blue.  We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the small of the back.  We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn to see Europe in flames.  Cowper put the case against all “fearful saints” (and sinners) when he said: 

    The clouds ye so much dread
    Are big with mercy, and will break
    With blessings on your head.

It is the clouds you don’t dread that swamp you.  Cowper knew, for he too was an apprehensive mortal, and it is only the apprehensive mortal who really knows the full folly of his apprehensiveness.

Now, save once, I have never lost a train in my life.  The exception was at Calais when the Brussels express did, in defiance of the time-table, really give me and others the slip, carrying with it my bag containing my clothes and the notes of a most illuminating lecture.  I chased that bag all through Northern France and Belgium, inquiring at wayside stations, wiring to junctions, hunting among the mountains of luggage at Lille.