absolute certainty upon things happening as you wish; when not
a misgiving has entered your mind as to your friend's arriving or
your letter coining. A little latent fear in your soul that you
may possibly be disappointed, seems to have a certain power to fend
off disappointment, on the same principle on which taking out an
umbrella is found to prevent rain. What you are prepared for rarely
happens. The precise thing you expected comes not once in a thousand
times. A confused state of mind results from long experience of
such cases. Your real feeling often is: Such a thing seems quite
sure to happen; I may say I expect it to happen; and yet I don't
expect it, because I do: for experience has taught me that the
precise thing which I expect, which I think most likely, hardly
ever comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world,
which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman
who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological
fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration--'It
did not weigh as much as I expected, and I never thought it would!'

When young ladies tell us that such and such a person 'has met with
a disappointment,' we all understand what is meant. The phrase,
though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy:
it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in
the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful
of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment
which a human being can ever know. Of course that is an entire
mistake. People get over that disappointment not but what it may
leave its trace, and possibly colour the whole of remaining life;
sometimes resulting in an unlovely bitterness and hardness of
nature; sometimes prolonging even into age a lingering thread of
old romance, and keeping a kindly corner in a heart which worldly