MATCHES IN TEENS.


"To marry!--Why, every man plays the fool once in his
life--but to marry is playing the fool all one's life
long."--CONGREVE.

There is something so satisfactory in knowing at once the limit of
your fortunes--in making yourself secure in the first instance of that
happiness to which all your exertions are directed,--which is in fact
the end and aim of your worldly existence, and of all your worldly
toils--the enjoyment of domestic peace and love;--in quenching that
restless, burning anxiety, which is ever busy within the bosom of the
young and the aspiring. Marrying early, in fact, is taking time by the
forelock, and leading your future destinies after you, instead of
suffering yourself to be led and tossed about by them,--it is tearing
away the black veil from the brow of futurity, and perusing all her
lineaments in her own despite. It is [he continued with an oratorical
attitude] building your fate upon a rock--"

"Ah!" I exclaimed, "stop there--that _rock_ is so commonplace."

Harry laughed and went on with his argument.--"Besides, there is the
gratification of making yourself _considered_ in society--which no
single man is. A single man is a kind of protected or licensed
vagabond--rambling to and fro without stamp or mark, as Witwould might
say,--like a sheep that has been overlooked at tarring time. His home
is a desert to him,--and the love of social converse, which is so
natural, and so amiable at the same time keeps him eternally in a
state of fidgetty restlessness, which precludes all possibility of