The difference of our conditions alone places a variety in these illusions; perhaps the lowest of us have the brightest, just as Cinderella, sitting amongst the coals, dreamed of the ball and beautiful prince as well as her sisters. "Bare and grim to tears," says Emerson, "is the lot of the children I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and would talk of 'the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown.' Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion." Happy is it that they are so. These fancies and illusions bring forth the inevitable disappointments, but they carry life on with a swing. If every hovel-born child had sat down at his doorstep, and taken true stock of himself, and had said, "I am a poor miserable child, weak in health, without knowledge, with little help, and can not do much," we should have wanted many a hero. We should have had no Stephenson, no Faraday, no Arkwright, and no Watt. Our railways would have been unbuilt, and the Atlantic Ocean would have been unbridged by steam. But hope, as phrenologists tells us, lies above caution, and has dangerous and active neighbors--wit, imagination, language, ideality--so the poor cottage is hung round with fancies, and the man exists to help his fellows. He may fail; but others take up his tangled thread, and unravel it, and carry on the great business of life.