ed, wildly, madly, and she whom I love has turned coldly from me
and shed her affections upon another. What would you advise me to
do?"

You should set your affections on another also--or on several, if there
are enough to go round. Also, do everything you can to make your former
flame unhappy. There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the
happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover
she has blighted. Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as
that. The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry
you, the more comfortable you will feel over it. It isn't poetical, but
it is mighty sound doctrine.

"ARITHMETICUS." Virginia, Nevada.--"If it would take a cannon-ball
3 and 1/3 seconds to travel four miles, and 3 and 3/8 seconds to
travel the next four, and 3 and 5/8 to travel the next four, and if
its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how
long would it take it to go fifteen hundred million miles?"

I don't know.

"AMBITIOUS LEARNER," Oakland.--Yes; you are right America was not
discovered by Alexander Selkirk.

"DISCARDED LOVER."--"I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha
Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence
at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to
be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?"

Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side.
The intention and not the act constitutes crime--in other words,
constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend
it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and
meaning no insult, it is not an insult. If you discharge a pistol
accidentally, and kill a man, you can go free, for you have done no
murder; but if you try to kill a man, and manifestly intend to kill him,
but fail utterly to do it, the law still holds that the intention
constituted the crime, and you are guilty of murder. Ergo, if you had
married Edwitha accidentally, and without really intending to do it, you
would not actually be married to her at all, because the act of marriage
could not be complete without the intention. And ergo, in the strict
spirit of the law, since you deliberately intended to marry Edwitha, and
didn't do it, you are married to her all the same--because, as I said
before, the intention constitutes the crime. I