apprehensions." "What sort of apprehensions?" I said. He laughed,
and replied, "Well, it is almost too absurd to mention, but I find
myself oppressed with anxiety for weeks beforehand as to whether,
when we get to Calais, we shall find places in the train." And I
remember, too, how a woman friend of mine once told me that she
called at the house of an elderly couple in London, people of rank
and wealth. Their daughter met her in the drawing-room and said, "I
am glad you are come--you may be able to cheer my mother up. We are
going down to-morrow to our place in the country; the servants and
the luggage went this morning, and my mother and father are to drive
down this afternoon--my mother is very low about it." "What is the
matter?" said my friend. The daughter replied, "She is afraid that
they will not get there in time!" "In time for what?" said my
friend, thinking that there was some important engagement. "In time
for tea!" said the daughter gravely.

It is all very well to laugh at such fears, but they are not
natural fears at all, they just indicate a low vitality; they are
the symptoms and not the causes of a disease. It is the frame of
mind of the sluggard in the Bible who says, "There is a lion in the
way." Younger people are apt to be irritated by what seems a wilful
creating of apprehensions. They ought rather to be patient and
reassuring, and compassionate to the weakness of nerve for which it
stands.

With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the
less distressing fears about health which beset people all their
lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoying to healthy people to
find a man reduced to depression and silence at the possibility of
taking cold, or at the fear of having eaten something unwholesome.