If one wishes to know how barren one's life is of events, the best way is to try to keep a journal. I tried it in my boarding-school days. With a few exceptions, the record of one day's outer life was sufficient for the week; the rest might have been written _ditto, ditto_. Even then, the events were so trifling that, like entries in a ledger, they might have been classed as _sundries_. How I tried to get up thoughts and feelings to make out a decent day's chronicle! How I threw in profound remarks on what I had read, sketches of character, caricatures of the teachers, even condescending to give the bill of fare; here, too, there might have been a great many _dittos_. Had I kept a record of my dream-life, what a variety there would have been! what extravagances, exceeded by nothing out of the _Arabian Nights' Entertainments_. Then, if I could have illuminated each day's page with my own fancy portrait of myself, the _Book of Beauty_ would not have been a circumstance to my journal. Certainly, among these portraits would not have been that plain, snub-nosed daguerreotype, sealed and directed to a dear home friend; but to the dear home friend no picture in the _Book of Beauty_ or my fancy journal would have had such charms; and if the daguerreotype would not have illuminated this journal, it was itself illuminated _by the light of a mother's love_. Alas! this light never more can rest on and irradiate the plain face of Molly O'Molly. After all, what a dull, monotonous life ours would be, if within this outer life there were not the inner life, the 'wheel within the wheel,' as in Ezekiel's vision. Though this inner wheel is 'lifted up whithersoever the spirit' wills 'to go,' the outer--unlike that in the vision--is not also lifted up; perhaps _hereafter_ it will be. The Mohammedans believe that, although unseen by mortals, 'the decreed events of every man's life are impressed in divine characters on his forehead.' If so, I shouldn't wonder if there was generally a large margin of forehead left, unless there is a great deal of repetition.... The record (not the prophecy) of the inner life, though it is hieroglyphed on the whole face too, is a scant one; not because there is but little to record, but because only results are chronicled. Like the _Veni, vidi, vici_, of Caesar. _Veni_; nothing of the weary march. _Vidi_; nothing of the doubts, fears, and anxieties. _Vici_; nothing of the fierce struggle.