Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/154

 actual, a more tangible, a more vivid identity than the day that exists, nay, than the day as yet unborn. One of the most characteristic and inconvenient delusions of humanity is its incapacity for enjoyment of the present. Life is a journey in which people are either looking forward or looking back. Nobody has the wisdom to sit down for half an hour in the shade listening to the birds overhead, examining the flowers under foot. It is always 'How pleasant it was yesterday! What fun we shall have to-morrow!' Never 'How happy we are to-day!' And yet what is the past, when we think of it, but a dream vanished into darkness—the future but an uncertain glimmer that may never brighten into dawn.

"It is strange how much stronger in old age than in youth is the tendency to live in the hereafter. Not the real hereafter of