th-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school-'xaminations, 'n'
s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,--and other entertainments where the
still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see
if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?--Fac' was, he was
livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't
he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough for him
and--let's see, haow old was she? Seven-'n'-twenty,--no,
six-'n'-twenty,--Born the same year we buried aour little Anny Mari.

There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But
"Portia," as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not
happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met
her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen
of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a
woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite
so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but
with two or three more joints in her frame and two or three soft
inflections in her voice which for some absurd reason or other drew
him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets
and looked into her eyes all that, he could not tell, in less time
than it would have taken him to discuss the champion paper of the last
Quarterly with the admirable "Portia." _Heu, quanta minus!_ How much
more was that lost image to him than all it left on earth!

The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about
so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who
will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known
except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as
it does, and why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling
questions.

The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his
daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of
life. It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves:
before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has
passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over
by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral
impulses which bandy