“The deuce take it.”

Observe how pathetic and touching his reminiscence of his lost youth and the priceless boon of liberty.  He commences in a quiet descriptive way, leaving one at a loss to know whether it is to be a joyful lyric a dirge he intends singing.

    “When I was a bachelor I lived by myself;
    All the bread and cheese I had I laid upon the shelf.”

Here we have him alone, at peace with himself and the world; happy in the contemplation of his beloved muse; jotting down, now and then, the brilliant ideas that flash through his teeming brain; and munching in solitude his homely meal of bread and cheese.  In telling us he laid his bread and cheese upon the shelf, he at once shows he had left his parental abode, and the ministering and watchful care of his maternal parent.

There must, of course, have been a cause for such a step.  Some reason why the gentle being should have been wrought up to that pitch, when he daringly throws off all restraint, and steps into the world to act and think for himself.  It may have been the want of sympathy that drove him to the act.  They were plain folks, and didn’t appreciate his peculiar turn of mind, and so only laughed at him, and ridiculed his pretensions.  That there was a quarrel there is no manner of doubt, and it was probably caused by the mortifying act of his mother in fainting when he read her the poetry he had written at her request.  That, in itself, was enough to break all ties between them.  She was horrified and overwhelmed with dismay that a child of hers could be guilty of such atrocious rhymes; and he, in turn, was disgusted that a mother of his should be so unappreciative and earthly.  And so, by mutual consent, they separated.

That accounts for his bachelor habit of laying his bread and cheese on the shelf that he might have it handy, and not forget where he had placed it.  But as

    “The rats and mice made such a strife,”

he found that would never do.  Something else must be thought of; and being an inventive genius, he tried putting it in his trunk, but it scented his Sunday jacket and trousers, and the girls all turned up their noses at the odd perfume.  So, driven to extremity, he in an evil hour decided, as many another has since done, that the remedy for his ills was matrimony, and that it was not well for man to live alone.

A Prophet is without honor in his own country, and so ofttimes is a Poet.  To his bashful supplication of “Wilt thou?” the young maidens if his village unhesitatingly refused to wilt, and thus it was that circumstances forced him

    “To go to London to buy himself a wife.”

How fortunate that he should give us, inadvertently as it were, the information so necessary to the unlucky young men of this later day, the best place to go shopping for wives!  No man after reading the above need say “he doesn’t marry because he cannot, as no one will have him.”  He need not stop for that hereafter, but just go to London, pick out one to suit, pay the price, and bag the article.  It can all be done in a day, and save time wonderfully.