Once, when he was ill, no angel had volunteered to smooth his pillow, and a Chinaman brought up delicacies left over from some other person’s previous meal.  He had no silent partner.  None of the girls knew he had been ailing, and when he told them weeks after they feigned surprise.  There seemed to be an unsurmountable stone wall between him and the sweet things of this world.  So, day after day, in his leisure moments, he would pace the brow of the sandhill seeking in his mind for a solution to an issue that seemed unfathomable.  Was he ugly?  No.  Was he repulsive?  No.  Was he a woman hater?  No.  Was he a criminal?  No.  Had he offended the fair sex in any way?  No.  Was he poor?  No.  Did he belong to the human family?  Yes.  With what disease then was he afflicted?  Was it heredity?  Could he cast the blame upon his ancestors?  Up and down the Thompson valley he searched and searched but he could find no answer—­even the echo would not speak.  Other fellows seemed to have no difficulty in getting themselves tangled up in the meshes of real beautiful love nets.  Even the young bucks who had no visible means of support for their own apparently useless avoirdupois, picked up the local gems before his eyes and had them hired out at interest to supply the new family with bread and butter.  And all this in the face of the fact that he was one of the most prodigious admirers of womankind that ever left his footprints on the sands of Ashcroft.

“The most flattering appointment a man can have is to be chosen the custodian of one woman,” he said to himself.  “Life, to a man, is nothing if barred from an association of this kind.”

At last in despair he wrote to a correspondence paper, and put the whole case before them.

“I am a young man, aged forty-two, unmarried.  I want a solution to the problem why I am unmarried.  I have tried and failed.  I have had Cupid working overtime for me, but he has failed to pierce any of the bosoms I have coveted.  No woman has ever loved me, and although I am aware that it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all, I may say that this affords very poor manna for my hunger.”

He received this answer:—­

“Young man”—­(emphasis was placed upon the young)—­“you are too slow.  You are asleep, stagnant, dormant, hibernating.  The whole world is ‘beating you to it.’  Get over your baby superstition about love, and ‘get busy.’”

The letter dropped from his fingers as though it had been his monthly grocery bill.  “Heavens!” he exclaimed, “here is the solution to the whole mystery.—­Forget love and ‘get busy.’” Instead of expecting to be loved, he would love.  If he could not get one who would want him, he would get one he wanted himself.