briefly this; That I had lost 250 pounds per annum,
against which I had 50 pounds to show by way of compensation. Women, I
have long noticed--or women of the best kind, I ought to add--have much
more genius in finance than men. They have a much keener sense of the
use of money; an excellent thing in women when it does not deteriorate
into cheese-paring and sordid parsimony. They, being primitive and
unsophisticated creatures, are unacquainted with the lax morals of the
cheque-book; a pound is just twenty shillings to them, and each
shilling is an entity, and each is spent with an indomitable aim to get
the most out of it. How would my wife regard the definite
disappearance of five thousand shillings? Not with levity, I knew; and
I thought it best to say nothing of that guinea volume on the _Tombs of
the Etruscans_. The _Tombs of the Etruscans_ would have meant to her
three pairs of boots; and I wished that I might conceal it in mine. A
wise bishop once argued that marriage was ordained not for man's
pleasure, but his discipline; I believe that he was not far wrong. It
is no use disputing the fact that the married man is always in danger
of the judgment; and it is only by some form of bribery that he can
hope to escape being cast in damages. I resolved on bribery, and made
my cheque the bribe. Here said I, was present wealth, let us be
content. The plea was not received with instant favour, but it was not
wholly ineffectual. By the time we sat down to supper that night we
had all attained to cheerfulness. It was a meal of some tenuity, not
calculated to lie heavy on the stomach; for, said Charlotte, 'If we
have to begin high thinking and plain living, we can't begin too
early.' The only load on my digestion that night was the _Tombs of the
Etruscans_.

It says much for the steadfastness of our convictions, that in this new
crisis of affairs the old resolution to seek a country life passed
unquestioned. What to another had seemed calamity appeared to us
opportunity. When the daily paper came next morning, it was not to the
columns where commerce chronicles its wants that my eye turned, but to
the much more engaging columns where lands and houses were advertised
for sale. This part of the newspaper had long ago attracted me by its
fine air of surreptitious romance. My mind had often been kept aglow
for a whole day by some seductive advertisement of cottages 'situate
amid pine-woods,' or farmhouses, all co