We recollect, ourselves, a child of our acquaintance who, playing on the beach at Newcastle, discovered a deposit of garnets there in the wave-washed sand, and ran hallooing up the shore for spades and bags to carry off the treasure, and whose dismay was only surpassed by that of the fox whose buried goose had been unearthed and stolen by another fox, when, on her returning full of expectancy, with a quickly assembled party, there was not a garnet to be found ; and she would have been deemed guilty of falsehood or of fancy if her little apron full of rough gems had not been witness to her veracity, and Hugh Miller had not afterward come to her support with relation of similar facts. So far from quenching the spirit of expectancy within her, the circumstance seemed to stimulate it during all the rest of her life, as if time and fate must needs atone for the loss by giving everything else she looked for a value beyond itself.
Many of our mental processes are as yet quite inscrutable and past finding out, and thus it would be of little use to endeavor to say why expectancy so doubles the value of consummation.
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| In the wave-washed sand. |
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