after he has won the
prize you cannot expect him to do so. You might as well plant a violet
in the face of a northeast storm with the idea of appeasing it. You
might as well run a schooner alongside of a burning ship with the idea
of saving the ship. The consequence will be, schooner and ship will be
destroyed together.

The almshouse could tell the story of a hundred women who married men
to reform them. If by twenty-five years of age a man has been grappled
by intoxicants, he is under such headway that your attempt to stop him
would be very much like running up the track with a wheelbarrow to
stop a Hudson River express train. What you call an inebriate nowadays
is not a victim to wine or whiskey, but to logwood and strychnine and
nux vomica. All these poisons have kindled their fires in his tongue
and brain, and all the tears of a wife weeping cannot extinguish the
flames. Instead of marrying a man to reform him, let him reform first,
and then give him time to see whether the reform is to be permanent.
Let him understand that if he cannot do without his bad habits for two
years he must do without you forever.

MEN WEDDED TO THE WORLD.

Avoid union with one supremely selfish, or so wound up in his
occupation that he has no room for another. You occasionally find a
man who spreads himself so widely over the path of life that there is
no room for any one to walk beside him. He is not the one blade of the
scissors incomplete without the other blade, but he is a chisel made
to cut his way through life alone, or a file full of roughness, made
to be drawn across society without any affinity for other files. His
disposition is a lifelong protest against marriage. Others are so
married to their occupation or profession that the taking of any other
bride is a case of bigamy. There are men as severely tied to their
literary work as was Chatterton, whose essay was not printed because
of the death of the Lord Mayor. Chatterton made out the following
account: "Lost by the Lord Mayor's death in this essay one pound
eleven shillings and six-pence. Gained in elegies and essays five
pounds and five shillings." Then he put what he had gained by the Lord
Mayor's death opposite to what he had lost, and wrote under it: "And
glad he is dead by three pounds thirteen shillings and six-pence."
When a man is as hopelessly literary as that he ought to be a
perpetual celibate; his library, his laboratory, his books are all the
companionsh