it ploughs deeply into the earth as it comes.  He is not surprised at these things.  They are nothing new.  It is just what he counted on.  But you will find that the same man, if his servants are lazy, careless, and forgetful, or if his friends are petted, wrong-headed, and impracticable, will not only get quite angry, but will get freshly angry at each new action which proves that his friends or servants possess these characteristics.  Would it not be better to make up your mind that such things are characteristic of humanity, and so that you must look for them in dealing with human beings?  And would it not be better, too, to regard each new proof of laziness, not as a new thing to be angry with, but merely as a piece of the one great fact that your servant is lazy, with which you get angry once for all, and have done with it?  If your servant makes twenty blunders a day, do not regard them as twenty separate facts at which to get angry twenty several times:  regard them just as twenty proofs of the one fact that your servant is a blunderer; and be angry just once, and no more.  Or if some one you know gives twenty indications in a day that he or she (let us say she) is of a petted temper, regard these merely as twenty proofs of one lamentable fact, and not as twenty different facts to be separately lamented.  You accept the fact that the person is petted and ill-tempered:  you regret it and blame it once for all.  And after this once you take as of course all new manifestations of pettedness and ill-temper.  And you are no more surprised at them, or angry with them, than you are at lead for being heavy, or at down for being light.  It is their nature, and you calculate on it, and allow for it.

Then the second of the two remaining things is this,—­that you have no right to complain, if you are postponed to greater people, or if you are treated with less consideration than you would be, if you were a greater person.  Uneducated people are very slow to learn this most obvious lesson.  I remember hearing of a proud old lady who was proprietor of a small landed estate in Scotland.  She had many relations,—­some greater, some less.  The greater she much affected, the less she wholly ignored.  But they did not ignore her; and one morning an individual arrived at her mansion-house, bearing a large box on his back.  He was a travelling peddler; and he sent up word to the old lady that he was her cousin, and hoped she would buy something from him.  The old lady indignantly refused to see him, and sent orders that he should forthwith quit the house.  The peddler went; but, on reaching the courtyard, he turned to the inhospitable dwelling, and in a loud voice exclaimed, in the ears of every mortal in the house, “Ay, if I had come in my carriage-and-four, ye wad have been proud to have ta’en me in!” The peddler fancied that he was hurling at his relative a scathing sarcasm:  he did not see that he was simply stating a perfectly unquestionable fact.  No doubt earthly, if he