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 so be that he arrives at the point of causing married women to sniff and married men to sigh, then he may know that his demonstration is a success and the lesson to be drawn therefrom unanswerable.

So, at the outset, I was confronted with the palpable necessity of building a house. Distinctly, there was no time to be lost, now that Uncle Ezra’s means were mine, for so long as a bachelor is not fairly and firmly entrenched in his stronghold there is a peril as inimical to his security as is the soft-spoken songbird to the unwary worm’s. I refer, of course, to the matchmaker — an affliction against which there is no law, no protection, and no remedy. She — I think the species boasts no male — resents the unmarried man as if he were a personal insult. From the moment when he crosses her path he is marked for the slaughter, and she begins to shuffle her kinsfolk and acquaintances as one shuffles the cards in the intellectual game of Old Maid, desperately