But the
optimist often gets himself into terrible scrapes, for if he is
wrong he cannot say he is glad of it.
But, whatever else he may be, a pessimist is depressing, and
it was, therefore, a great pleasure to me to have a friend who
was an out-and-out optimist. In fact, he might be called a
working optimist. He lived about six miles from my house, and
had a hobby, which was natural phenomena. He was always on the
lookout for that sort of thing, and when he found it he would
study its nature and effect. He was a man in the maturity of
youth, and if the estate on which he lived had not belonged to
his mother, he would have spent much time and money in
investigating its natural phenomena. He often drove over to see
me, and always told me how glad he would be if he had an
opportunity of digging a well.
"I have the wildest desire," he said, "to know what is in the
earth under our place, and if it should so happen in the course
of time that the limits of earthly existence should be reached
by--I mean if the estate should come into my hands--I would
go down, down, down, until I had found out all that could be
discovered. To own a plug of earth four thousand miles long and
only to know what is on the surface of the upper end of it is
unmanly. We might as well be grazing beasts."
He was sorry that I was digging only for water, because water
is a very commonplace thing, but he was quite sure I would get
it, and when my well was finished he was one of the first to
congratulate me.
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