and the young lady also have that disease, consult the physicians of your families.  A very learned man, in a series of papers in the Atlantic Monthly, some years ago, refused to forbid such marriages entirely.  Put yourselves especially under the care of your doctors, and follow their advice implicitly.  If the young lady, alone, is consumptive, extend your engagement and wait for events.  If you yourself are thus tainted with disease, I have little hesitation in saying that it is not manly to get married until you are entirely out of the reach of pecuniary want without your labor, and even then there are other considerations of nearly equal importance which should lead you to frequent conferences with your family doctor.

YOU THUS SEE THAT “LIFE IS REAL,

and life is earnest.”  If you are healthy, thank God for it, and sing merrily while you build the nest which will hold the mate in warmth and comfort.  After the harbor of refuge is built, the ship will find a pleasant and ever-welcome anchorage during the big storms outside.

Take the daughter of a good mother.

[Illustration]

MARRIAGE.

     The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
     A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
     Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
     Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again,
     And all went merry as a marriage-bell.—­Byron.

Quotation of this verse is made, not because it celebrated a marriage—­it, rather, commemorated the frightful carnage of Waterloo—–­ but because it very faithfully represents the fashionable beginning of wedded life, to which it alludes.  There seems to be in woman an inherited, instinctive desire for this kind of thing at her marriage.  It is cruel to deny her, therefore man usually goes through with it like a martyr.  My prejudices are so heartily enlisted against “blow-outs” of this kind that I feel the compunctions of an honest judge at sitting in such a case.  Nevertheless, I may relate some things I have seen, to show how badly a couple may start in life.  Here is one instance:  The dust has filled the air for six blocks around some stately church.  The “hacks” and private barouches and coupes have been packed together so that any movement was entirely impossible; the bride has come like a queen of the orient; she has walked on flowers to the vestibule; there she has passed under an arch of tuberoses; half-way down the aisle a gate of jessamines and smilax has opened with a smothering sense of richness; at the altar she has actually knelt on a pillow of camellias (fifty cents apiece); and a fifty-dollar organist has put on his full instrument, as though he were proclaiming the glory of God most mighty, instead of the folly of man most miserable.  Into the church have thronged the elect, proud and disdainful; on the outside has