still and do nothing.”  Is not that absurd?  Yet that is what many a wise and good man practically says about the place in life which would suit him, and which would make him happy.  Not Turks and Hindoos alone have a tendency to believe in their Kismet.  It is human to believe in that.  And we grasp at every event that seems to favor the belief.  The other evening, in the twilight, I passed two respectable-looking women who seemed like domestic servants; and I caught one sentence which one said to the other with great apparent faith.  “You see,” she said, “if a thing’s to come your way, it’ll no gang by ye!” It was in a crowded street; but if it had been in my country parish, where everyone knew me, I should certainly have stopped the women, and told them, that, though what they said was quite true, I feared they were understanding it wrongly, and that the firm belief we all hold in God’s Providence which reaches to all events, and in His sovereignty which orders all things, should be used to help us to be resigned, after we have done our best and failed, but should never be used as an excuse for not doing our best.  When we have set our mind on any honest end, let us seek to compass it by every honest means; and if we fail after having used every honest means, then let us fall back on the comfortable belief that things are ordered by the Wisest and Kindest; then is the time for the Fiat Voluntas Tua.

You would not wish, my friend, to be deprived of common sense and of delicate feeling, even though you could be quite sure that once that drag-weight was taken off, you would spring forward to the van, and make such running in the race of life as you never made before.  Still, you cannot help looking with a certain interest upon those people who, by the want of these hindering influences, are enabled to do things and say things which you never could.  I have sometimes looked with no small curiosity upon the kind of man who will come uninvited, and without warning of his approach, to stay at another man’s house:  who will stay on, quite comfortable and unmoved, though seeing plainly he is not wanted:  who will announce, on arriving, that his visit is to be for three days, and who will then, without farther remark, and without invitation of any kind, remain for a month or six weeks:  and all the while sit down to dinner every day with a perfectly easy and unembarrassed manner.  You and I, my reader, would rather live on much less than sixpence a day than do all this.  We could not do it.  But some people not merely can do it, but can do it without any appearance of effort.  Oh, if the people who are victimized by these horse-leeches of society could but gain a little of the thickness of skin which characterizes the horse-leeches, and bid them be off, and not return again till they are invited!  To the same pachydermatous class belong those individuals who will put all sorts of questions as to the private affairs of other people, but carefully