Even a slight disappointment, speedily to be repaired, has in it something that jars painfully the mechanism of the mind. You go to the train, expecting a friend, certainly. He does not come. Now this worries you, even though you receive at the station a telegraphic message that he will be by the train which follows in two hours. Your magazine fails to come by post on the last day of the month; you have a dull, vague sense of something wanting for an hour or two, even though you are sure that you will have it next morning. And indeed a very krge share of the disappointments of civilized life are associated with the post-office. I do not suppose the extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative who is desperately sick. I am thinking merely of the lesser disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness--a feeling difficult to define--attends even the slightest disappointment; and the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed. You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he consigned everything to perdition. All the ballads of Professor Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else, bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively:-- Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loathsome fees did earn; Cursed be the clerk and parson; CURSED BE THE WHOLE CONCERN!