man to commit matrimony.  Some one will say:  ‘To have some one to care for him when sick.’  This is complimentary to woman—­indicating that she marries to become a nurser of the sick and old.  And must a man endure all the pains and throes of years of matrimonial cyclones that he may have some one to stew his gruel during the brief space of his last illness?  If a bachelor have money, he will have friends to care for him, no fear, and if he be poor, a wife is the last thing in the world he needs.  She divides his pleasures and doubles his sorrows.

HE MUST DANCE TO FASHION’S TUNE—­

a palatial residence, a corps of servants, a livery, and dresses from Paris—­for the sake of having some one to receive and entertain his friends’ wives.  He must support his wife’s relations, and endure no end of feminine abuse, which is not always so feminine.  The world is divided into two classes:  Those who are unmarried, but wish they were, and those who are married, but wish they were not.”

THIS IS A FAIR SPECIMEN

of the argument by which the bachelor convinces himself that he is happy.  If it does contribute to his peace of mind, why should the world care?  And the world really does not care.  When he comes to have his gruel stewed for him in a hospital, or, worse yet, a boarding-house, he finds out, all of a sudden, that he is really in the way, and that, in his life of perfect selfishness, he has never secured that thing which cannot be bought, yet which he so yearns for now in the hour of his feebleness, a woman’s love.  A good long sickness has greatly enlarged many a man’s philosophy!

Still, it is not in the destiny of every man to have a wife, or to keep her if he get one.  It is not unwise, therefore to consider that state as one of the phases of life, and to contemplate its various aspects, good and bad, as we have the other conditions of existence.  “A man unattached and without wife,” says Bruyere, “if he have any genius at all, may raise himself above his original position, may mingle with the world of fashion, and hold himself on a level with the highest; this is less easy for him who is engaged; it seems as if marriage put the whole world in their proper rank.”  “I have” says Burton, the melancholy, “no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for, and am a mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures.”

THE ONE GRAND RESULT OF SINGLE LIFE,

so far as is generally noticeable, is selfishness.  The chief lesson of marriage is self-denial.  Which is the more pleasing of the two traits?  When the bachelor views life, he sees nothing good in it, for it all looks selfish.  Being so deeply jaundiced, the eye tints everything with yellow.  At forty he is heartily sick of it all.  Why?  Because he has learned that he has squeezed the orange dry.  The faculties which God gave him to be pleased with when a recipient have been worked to death.