hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman
will accept them. Now this is the very height of absurdity. A
kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and the mass
of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious
exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the
married state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is
fundamentally a good one, and then to take it for granted that
all minor objections, should there be such, will vanish, if you
let them alone. Only put yourself beyond hazard as to the real
basis of matrimonial bliss, and it is scarcely to be imagined
what miracles, in the way of recognizing smaller incongruities,
connubial love will effect.

For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was
precisely such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the
reader not to be. My early habits had gifted me with a feminine
sensibility and too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished
graduate of a dry goods store, where, by dint of ministering to
the whims of fine ladies, and suiting silken hose to delicate
limbs, and handling satins, ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes,
gauze, and cambric needles, I grew up a very ladylike sort of a
gentleman. It is not assuming too much to affirm that the ladies
themselves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas Bullfrog. So
painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection, and such
varied excellence did I require in the woman whom I could love,
that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of
being driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the
looking-glass. Besides the fundamental principle already hinted
at, I demanded the fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy
ringlets, and the whole list of lovely items, with the utmost