had considerable expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I told you before.  She had this saying always in her mouth:  that I “had money enough; that it was time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a spirit befitting my circumstances.”  In short, what with her importunities, and my own desires in part cooeperating,—­for, as I said, I was not yet quite twenty-seven, a time when the youthful feelings may be pardoned, if they show a little impetuosity,—­I resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set about the business of courting in right earnest.  I was a young man then, and having a spice of romance in my character, (as the reader doubtless has observed long ago,) such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had reason in no long time to think my addresses were anything but disagreeable.

Certainly the happiest part of a young man’s life is the time when he is going a-courting.  All the generous impulses are then awake, and he feels a double existence in participating his hopes and wishes with another being.  Return yet again for a brief moment, ye visionary views, transient enchantments! ye moonlight rambles with Cleora in the Silent Walk at Vauxhall,—­(N.B.—­About a mile from Birmingham, and resembling the gardens of that name near London, only that the price of admission is lower,)—­when the nightingale has suspended her notes in June to listen to our loving discourses, while the moon was overhead! (for we generally used to take our tea at Cleora’s mother’s before we set out, not so much to save expenses as to avoid the publicity of a repast in the gardens,—­coming in much about the time of half-price, as they call it)—­ye soft intercommunions of soul, when, exchanging mutual vows, we prattled of coming felicities!  The loving disputes we have had under those trees, when this house (planning our future settlement) was rejected, because, though cheap, it was dull, and the other house was given up, because, though agreeably situated, it was too high-rented,—­one was too much in the heart of the town, another was too far from business.  These minutiae will seem impertinent to the aged and the prudent.  I write them only to the young.  Young lovers, and passionate as being young, (such were Cleora and I then,) alone can understand me.  After some weeks wasted, as I may now call it, in this sort of amorous colloquy, we at length fixed upon the house in the High Street, No. 203, just vacated by the death of Mr. Hutton of this town, for our future residence.  I had till that time lived in lodgings (only renting a shop for business) to be near to my mother,—­near, I say:  not in the same house with her, for that would have been to introduce confusion into our housekeeping, which it was desirable to keep separate.  Oh, the loving wrangles, the endearing differences I had with Cleora, before we could quite make up our minds to the house that was to receive us!—­I pretending, for argument’s sake, that the rent