first and woo afterwards!"

"'Tis not a bad idea, and I can see it might lend an ease and certainty
to the pastime which our method lacks. But if the woman is got first and
sued subsequently, who brings you together? Who sees to the essential
preliminaries of assortment?"

An, looking at my shoes as though she speculated on the remoteness of
the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied,
"The urn, stranger, the urn does that--what else? How it may be in that
out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but here--'tis so
commonplace I should have thought you must have known it--we put each
new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the men draw for
them, each town, each village by itself, and those they draw are theirs;
is it conceivable your race has other methods?"

I told her it was so--we picked and chose for ourselves, beseeching the
damsels, fighting for them, and holding the sun of romance was at its
setting just where the Martians held it to rise. Whereat An burst out
laughing--a clear, ringing laugh that set all the light-hearted folk in
the nearest boats laughing in sympathy. But when the grotesqueness of
the idea had somewhat worn off, she turned grave and asked me if such
a fancy did not lead to spite, envy, and bickerings. "Why, it seems to
me," she said, shaking her curly head, "such a plan might fire cities,
desolate plains, and empty palaces--"

"Such things have been."

"Ah! our way is much the better. See!" quoth that gentle philosopher.
"'Here,' one of our women would say, 'am I to-day, unwed, as free of