Fearful folk are always on the brink of ruin. They cannot wait to see how things will turn before they despair; and they cannot hope for the best in a bad pass. They are engulfed in abysses which never open, and they die a thousand deaths before the supreme moment actually arrives. The smallest difficulties are to them like the straws placed crosswise over which no witch could pass; the beneficent action of time, either as a healer of sorrow or a revealer of hidden mercies, is a word of comfort they cannot accept for themselves, how true soever it may be for others; the doctrine that chances are equal for good as well as for bad is what they will not understand; and they know of no power that can avert the disaster, which perhaps is simply a possibility not even probable, and which their own fears only have arranged. If they are professional men, having to make their way, they are for ever anticipating failure for to-day and absolute destruction for to-morrow; and they bemoan the fate of the wife and children sure to be left to poverty by their untimely decease, when the chances are ten to one in favour of the apportioned threescore and ten years. Life is a place of suffering here and a place of torment hereafter; yet they often wish to die, reversing Hamlet's decision by thinking the mystery of unknown ills preferable to the reality of those they have on hand. Over such minds as these the vaticinations of such a prophet as Dr. Cumming have peculiar power; and they accept his gloomy interpretations of the Apocalypse with a faith as unquestioning as that with which they accept the Gospels. They have a predilection indeed for all terrifying prophecies, and cast the horoscope of the earth and foretell the destruction of the universe with marvellous exactitude. Their minds are set to the trick of foreboding, and they live in the habit of fear, as others live in the habit of hope, of resignation, or of careless good-humour and indifference. There is nothing to be done with them. Like drinking, or palsy, or a nervous headache, or a congenital deformity, the habit is hopeless when once established; and those who have begun by fear and suspicion and foreboding will live to the end in the atmosphere they have created for themselves. The man or woman whose mind is once haunted by the nightly fear of a secreted burglar will go on looking for his heels so long as eyesight and the power of locomotion continue; and no failure in past Apocalyptic interpretations will shake the believer's faith in those of which the time for fulfilment has not yet arrived. It is a trick which has rooted, a habit that has crystallized by use into a formation; and there it must be left, as something beyond the power of reason to remedy or of experience to destroy. _OLD LADIES._