Now, he had had such an admiration for the fair sex as a whole, that he could not concentrate his attention on the individual one.  He had been trying to extract a cinder from the eye of the opposition when he could not see properly owing to having a large obstacle in his own eye.  However, he proceeded to “get busy.”  But what vision would he “get busy” on?  Every woman had an attraction peculiar to herself, one of which could not be said to extinguish the other.  And then, most of them were “staked off.”  One fellow or another had “strings” on every one he approached.  But he kept on fishing with all his might.  In the meantime it came to pass that the girls continued to cast their spells upon almost anyone but him; even the itinerant stranger who just chanced along “hitting the high spots,” and “travelling on his face” came in for large portions of the “sweet stuff” that was being cast lavishly abroad.

It seemed cruel that he who had such an admiration for those on the other side of the house, and who had such an ambition to own one as an asset, should be so unmercifully neglected.  His efforts to catch a wife by the legitimate method, according to his idea, had ended like a fishing expedition in the off season in the Thompson river.  About this time he found that the nomads were catching all the fish.  He made up his mind to become a nomad and be a wanderer on the face of the Cariboo district.  He could not love.

He resigned his position in Ashcroft and migrated up the Cariboo road.  He invaded Lillooet, Clinton, 150 Mile House, Soda Creek, Quesnel, Barkerville and Fort George.  To secure a wife he became an itinerant.  Within the space of a year he was back at his position at Ashcroft more lonely than ever.  It was of no avail—­he was hoodooed.  He could not love.

At this juncture he made another and final discovery, and it was the most important one he had made at this period of his renaissance.  He found out that “get busy” had two meanings.  It meant “forget love of all kinds and go to it in a business-like way.”  This had been a chronic case of a man, in his ignorance, who was prospecting around the hills of this British Columbia of ours for a metal that had no existence.  He did not know that ninety out of every hundred marriages resulted merely from convenience, or a mere desire to be married on the part of the man, and the love of a private home on the part of the woman; that nine out of the remaining ten were marriages in which one of the parties only was the love-giver, and that the remaining one was the ideal, in which love was mutual and beautiful.  This Ashcroft bachelor fellow was a sentimental monstrosity.  He was imbued with the superstition that one must love, and be loved, before one could marry.  No aphorism could be further removed from the truth.  The glaring realism dawned upon him that it was quite possible for a person to flounder through this world and be entirely immune from the love epidemic; that