take a spark any day, and blow up nobody knows whose peace or prospects.
What I dreaded most was one of those miserable matrimonial misalliances
where a young fellow who does not know himself as yet flings his
magnificent future into the checked apron-lap of some fresh-faced,
half-bred country-girl, no more fit to be mated with him than her
father's horse to go in double harness with Flora Temple. To think of
the eagle's wings, being clipped so that he shall never lift himself over
the farm-yard fence! Such things happen, and always must,--because, as
one of us said awhile ago, a man always loves, a woman, and a woman a
man, unless some good reason exists to the contrary. You think yourself
a very fastidious young man, my friend; but there are probably at least
five-thousand young women in these United States, any one of whom you
would certainly marry, if you were thrown much into her company, and
nobody more attractive were near, and she had no objection. And you, my
dear young lady, justly pride yourself on your discerning delicacy; but
if I should say that there are twenty thousand young men, any one of
whom, if he offered his hand and heart under favorable circumstances, you
would

"First endure, then pity, then embrace,"

I should be much more imprudent than I mean to be, and you would, no
doubt, throw down a story in which I hope to interest you.

I had settled it in my mind that this young fellow had a career marked
out for him. He should begin in the natural way, by taking care of poor
patients in one of the public charities, and work his way up to a better
kind of practice,--better, that is, in the vulgar, worldly sense. The
great and good Boerhaave used to say, as I remember very well, that the
poor were his best patients; for God was their paymaster. But everybody