Then the silent gentry who brew our Chartreuse; what are they in retirement for?  Looking back into history, with the glow of discovery in my eyes, I find records of wise men—­everyone acknowledged they were wise men—­who lived apart.  In every age the same associate of solitude, silence, and wisdom.  The holy hermits!...  I grant it, they professed to flee wickedness and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is that they fled bothers.  We all know they had an intense aversion to any savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, dined, visited, had new clothes.  Holiness, indeed!  They were viveurs....  We have witnessed Religion without Theology, and why not an Unsectarian Thebaid?  I sometimes fancy it needs only one brave man to begin....  If it were not for the fuss Euphemia would make I certainly should.  But I know she would come and worry me worse than St. Anthony was worried until I put them all on again, and that keeps me from the attempt.

I am curious whether mine is the common experience.  I fancy, after all, I am only seeing in a clearer way, putting into modern phrase, so to speak, an observation old as the Pentateuch.  And looking up I read upon a little almanac with which Euphemia has cheered my desk:—­

        “The world was sad” (sweet sadness!)
        “The garden was a wild” (a picturesque wild)
        “And man the hermit” (he made no complaint)
        “Till the woman smiled.”—­Campbell.

[And very shortly after he had, as you know, all that bother about the millinery.]

ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE

Wife-choosing is an unending business.  This sounds immoral, but what I mean will be clearer in the context.  People have lived—­innumerable people—­exhausted experience, and yet other people keep on coming to hand, none the wiser, none the better.  It is like a waterfall more than anything else in the world.  Every year one has to turn to and warn another batch about these stale old things.  Yet it is one’s duty—­the last thing that remains to a man.  And as a piece of worldly wisdom, that has nothing to do with wives, always leave a few duties neglected for the comfort of your age.  There are such a lot of other things one can do when one is young.

Now, the kind of wife a young fellow of eight- or nine-and-twenty insists on selecting is something of one-and-twenty or less, inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well dressed, not too clever, accomplished; but I need not go on, for the youthful reader can fill in the picture himself from his own ideal.  Every young man has his own ideal, as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike.  Now, I do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres.  Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove.  Take, for instance, the statement that “beauty fades.”  Absurd; everyone knows perfectly well that, as the