“Congratulate you, old fellow!”

“Do you think of going up in a balloon for a wedding-trip?”

They all came around me, clinked their glasses with mine, shook hands with me, and drank my health, her health, the health of my mother-in-law, and any other toast that would serve as an excuse for emptying a glass.

“I say, will she cut rough on us chaps?” asked Percy in a plaintive voice as the hubbub subsided.

“Gentlemen,” cried I, waving my hand, “my wife that is to be is an angel.”

“Wish she would stay in heaven!” muttered Percy.

“What I mean by an angel is a perfect woman.”

“Worse still,” said the irrepressible Perce. (By the by, the wits had nicknamed him “Perce sans purse,” because he was poor, you know, but he was a good fellow, quite.)

“Gentlemen, let me explain.”

“Hear! hear!”

“I have been looking for a wife for the past year:  I have thought much on the subject, for I think it an important one.”

“Solomon!” said Perce out of his wine-glass.

“Now, a good wife must be a refined, gentle, kind, loving, beautiful woman, with no nonsense about her.”

“Amen to the last clause!” cried Bear de Witt.

“You have found her?” asked Percy, absently watching the sparkling bubbles rise one after the other in his glass.

“Ah—­aw—­I will bring her home,” I answered, evading the question—­“my love, my bliss, my delight!”

“He is awful spoony on her,” said Bear in a disgusted tone.

“He is tipsy,” whispered Percy as I sat down with a tremor in my voice and wiped my eyes with a napkin.

Then Perce began to lecture me in an injured tone:  “I say, it is really too bad of you.  I should not have believed it if you had not told us yourself.  To go and get married like any fool of a fella’ that hasn’t forty thou’ a year, like any common man—­it’s too rough.”

“I know it, Perce,” I replied, “but we superior people must set an example—­the world expects it of us.  The only question is, how to make a proper choice.”

I remember very little after, except that the lights shone dimmer through the cigar-smoke, that there was much noise from popping corks, and occasionally a breakage of glass, and I think I made another speech.  Next morning I awoke with a very robust and well-defined head-ache.

A few days later I started for the back-woods, with Wordsworth packed in my trunk, he being the writer most congenial to my present state of mind.  Once seated in the cars, I looked with pleasure on each pastoral scene as it came into view, and gazed at the milkmaids while thinking romantically of my love.  I took a nap, and awoke respectfully pressing the handle of my portmanteau and murmuring a proposal to my wild flower.

It was late when I arrived at the little village near which my friend resided, and I resolved to spend the night at the modest inn of the place.  The gay singing of birds, mingled with the ringing of Sunday bells, caused my drowsy eyes to open on the morrow.  A happy thought came to me as I lay enjoying the delightful freshness of all around me:  “I will go to church:  my little Innocence will be there.  I know she is pious.  As unconscious as the birds, and with as sweet a voice, she will, like them, be praising her Maker this bright morning.”