reader must realise from the beginning that I am still quite a
young man. I talked a little just now as though I were an
octogenarian. Actually, as I said, I am but just gone thirty, and
I may reasonably regard life, as the saying is, all before me. I
was a little down-hearted when I wrote yesterday. Besides, I
wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy time. The
morning is the time to write. We are all--that is, those of us
who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sad
enough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of
this book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning. This
book! oh, yes, I forgot!--I am going to write
a book. A book about what? Well, that must be as God wills.
But listen! As I lay in bed this morning between sleeping and
waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into my room,--a mad,
whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and put briefly, it
is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, a man
not without accomplishments or experience, should have gone all
these years without finding that


"Not impossible she
Who shall command my heart and me,"--


without meeting at some turning of the way the mystical Golden
Girl,--without, in short, finding a wife?

"Then," suggested the idea, with a blush for its own absurdity,
"why not go on pilgrimage and seek her? I don't believe you'll
find her. She isn't usually found after thirty. But you'll no