Then, too, the greatest gain of all, there comes a sort of patience.  In youth mistakes seemed irreparable, calamities intolerable, ambitions realizable, disappointments unbearable.  An anxiety hung like a dark impenetrable cloud, a disappointment poisoned the springs of life.  But now I have learned that mistakes can often be set right, that anxieties fade, that calamities have sometimes a compensating joy, that an ambition realized is not always pleasurable, that a disappointment is often of itself a great incentive to try again.  One learns to look over troubles, instead of looking into them; one learns that hope is more unconquerable than grief.  And so there flows into the gap the certainty that one can make more of misadventures, of unpromising people, of painful experiences, than one had ever hoped.  It may not be, nay, it is not, so eager, so full-blooded a spirit; but it is a serener, a more interesting, a happier outlook.

And so, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, striking a balance of my advantages and disadvantages, I am inclined to think that the good points predominate.  Of course there still remains the intensely human instinct, which survives all the lectures of moralists, the desire to eat one’s cake and also to have it.  One wants to keep the gains of middle life and not to part with the glow of youth.  “The tragedy of growing old,” says a brilliant writer, “is the remaining young;” that is to say, that the spirit does not age as fast as the body.  The sorrows of life lie in the imagination, in the power to recall the good days that have been and the old sprightly feelings; and in the power, too, to forecast the slow overshadowing and decay of age.  But Lord Beaconsfield once said that the worst evil one has to endure is the anticipation of the calamities that do not happen; and I am sure that the thing to aim at is to live as far as possible in the day and for the day.  I do not mean in an epicurean fashion, by taking prodigally all the pleasure that one can get, like a spendthrift of the happiness that is meant to last a lifetime, but in the spirit of Newman’s hymn—­

            “I do not ask to see
    The distant scene; one step enough for me.”

Even now I find that I am gaining a certain power, instinctively, I suppose, in making the most of the day and hour.  In old days, if I had a disagreeable engagement ahead of me, something to which I looked forward with anxiety or dislike, I used to find that it poisoned my cup.  Now it is beginning to be the other way; and I find myself with a heightened sense of pleasure in the quiet and peaceful days that have to intervene before the fateful morning dawns.  I used to awake in the morning on the days that were still my own before the day which I dreaded, and begin, in that agitated mood which used to accompany the return of consciousness after sleep, when the mind is alert but unbalanced, to anticipate the thing I feared, and feel that I could not face it.  Now