Folks expect too much. As many, and many times as their hopes has proved to be uronious, they think, well now, if I only had that certain thing, or was in that certain place, I should be happy. But they haint. They find when they reach that certain gole and have climbed up and sot down on it, they’ll find that somebody has got onto the gole before ’em, and is there a settin’ on it. No matter how spry anybody may be, they’ll find that Sorrow can climb faster than they can, and can set down on goles quicker. It haint no matter how easy a seat anybody sets down in, they’ll find that they’ll have to hunch along, and let Disappointment set down with ’em, and Anxiety, and Weariness, and et ceteree, et ceteree. Now, the scholar, or the literatoor, or writer, thinks if he can only stand up on that certain hite of scientific discovery, or Akkropolis of literatoor, he will be happy; for he will know all that he cares about, and will have all the fame he wants to. But when he gets up there, he’ll see plain, for the higher he riz above the mists of ignorance that floats ’round the lower lands, the clearer his vision, and he will see another peek right ahead of him steeper and loftier and icier than the last, and so on ad infinitum, ad infinity. And if it is literatoor, he’ll see somebody that’s got higher, or thinks he has, or he’ll find some critick that says he hasn’t done much, and Shakespeare did better. Just as it was with old Mrs. Peedick, our present Mrs. Peedick’s mother-in-law, she said, she told me with her own lips, that she knew she should be happy when she got a glass butter-dish, but she said she wasn’t; she told me with her own lips, that jest as quick as she got that she wanted a sugar-bowl, for the Druffels had sugar-bowls, and why shouldn’t she? The lover thinks, when he can once claim his sweetheart, call her his own, he will be blessed and content; but he hain’t. No matter how well he loves her, no matter how fond she is of him, and how blessed they are in each other’s love, the haunting fear must always rack his soul, the horrible fear be there, of seeing her slip away from him altogether. That in place of her warm, beating heart, whose every throb is full of love for him, will be only her vacant place, and instead of the tender sweetness of her voice, the everlasting silence of Eternity. The little ones that cling to our knees, that pray beside us at bed-time, and the patter of whose feet is such music to us—they go, too, and we no more feel their kisses, or hear their tiny voices. Every day, every hour, we are losing something, that we called our own. You see we don’t own much of anything in this world. It’s curious, but so it is. And what we call our own, don’t belong to us; not at all. That is one of the things that makes this such an extremely curious world to live in. Yes, we are situated extremely curious, as much so as the robins and swallows who build their nests on the swaying forest boughs.