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fair plaintiff has not suffered the grass of inaction to grow upon her feet, having already issued her Statement of Claim, by which she alleges that I proposed marriage on a certain date, and did subsequently, on divers occasions, treat her, in the presence of sundry witnesses, as an affianced, after which I mizzled into obscurity, and on various pretexts did decline, and do still decline, to fulfil my nuptial contract, by which conduct the plaintiff, being grievously afflicted in mind, body, and estate, claims damages to the doleful tune of £1000.

(N.B.—I have thought it advisable here and there to translate the legal phraseology into more comprehensible verbiage.)

Now such a claim is to milk a ram, or prendre la lune avec les dents, seeing that I am not a proprietor of even one thousand rupees. 182