How often life has been likened to a journey, a pilgrimage, with its deserts to cross, its mountains to climb!... The road to---- Lake, distant from my home some eight or ten miles, partly lies through a mountain pass. You drive a few miles--and a beautiful drive it is, with its pines and hemlocks, their dark foliage contrasting with the blue sky--on either hand high mountains; now at your left, then at your right, and again at your left runs now swiftly over stones, now lingering in hollows, making good fishing-places, a creek, that has come many glad miles on its way to the river. But how are you to get over that mountain just before you? Your horse can't draw you up its rocky, perpendicular front! Never mind, drive along--there, the mountain is behind you--the road has wound around it. Thus it is with many a mountain difficulty in our way, we never have it to climb. There is now and then one, though, that we do have to climb, and we can't be drawn or carried up by a faithful nag, but our weary feet must toil up its steep and rugged side. But many a pilgrim before us has climbed it, and we will not faint on the way. 'What man has done, man may do.' ... Yet, till I have found out to a certainty, I never will be sure that the mountain that seemingly blocks up my way, _has not a path winding round it_. Then the past.... Some one says we are happier our whole life for having spent one pleasant day. Keats says: 'A thing of beauty is a joy _forever_.' I believe this: to me the least enjoyment has been like a grain of musk dropped into my being, sending its odor into all my after-life--it may be that centuries hence it will not have lost its fragrance. Who knows? But sorrows--they should, like bitter medicines, be washed down with sweet; we should get the taste of them out of our mouth as soon as possible. We are as apt to borrow trouble from the might-have-beens of our past life as from any thing else. We mourn over the chances we've missed--the happiness that eel-like has slipped through our fingers. This is folly; for generally there are so many ifs in the way, that nearly all the might-have-beens turn into couldn't-have-beens. Even if they do not, it is well for us when we don't know them.... The object of our weary search glides past us like Gabriel past Evangeline, so near, did we only know it: happy is it for us if we do not, like her, too late learn it; for 'Of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these--_it might have been!_' So sad are they, that they would be a suitable refrain to the song of a lost spirit. Well, I might have been ----, but am ---- MOLLY O'MOLLY. IX.