may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he
would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation.
We need not deny that the grasshopper on man's shoulder is
a burden; but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman
who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant
when he knows there are no elephants in the country.
We may concede that a straw may break the camel's back,
but we like to know that it really is the last straw and
not the first.

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right
to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else.
It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always
do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about
your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head.
But people with great troubles talk about little ones,
and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often
has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly
a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified
in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills.
I do no deny that molehills can sometimes be important.
Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more
abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before,
they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition
that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III.
died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his
varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain.
But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man
(not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make
them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty