“Do not moot the former idea before my uncle, or he may cut me off with a shilling, and so deprive you of all chance of ever managing his estates. For myself, I do not care for more money; I am thinking of going out to Australia, and taking a sheepfarm; of doing the Arcadian for a few years, during which time you will marry some one else, and I shall enjoy a bachelor’s existence by way of variety. I am growing horribly tired of the monotony of civilised life. I wonder if I could join a mission as a muscular Christian, and go out to convert the heathen. I should like to see how a fellow with a lot of wives manages them. I should preach the same doctrines as——” But at this point Mrs. Croft swept out of the room, and her husband took advantage of her absence to seize his hat and leave the house, and march away in a blazing sun to Hastings, where, according to the programme she had sketched for her own guidance, Heather was not at home. “I am getting confoundedly tired of this,” Mr. Croft remarked to his uncle next day, as they lounged together along the Marina; “suppose we swear business requires our immediate presence in town; cannot we have letters by the five o’clock post, compelling us to go up by the express to-morrow morning? Madam in town is bad enough, but madam at a watering-place, or in the country, is scarcely to be borne.” “What a choice you made, Douglas!” said his uncle, in a tone of plaintive rebuke. “Did I choose at all? I doubt it,” was the reply. “Since my marriage, I often should have liked to choose; but perhaps, had power been given me to do so, I might only have made a worse mess of it. The best of a marriage like mine is, it makes a man so philosophical. It leaves one nothing to wish for, nothing to desire; jealousy, over-affection, anxiety about the dear creature’s health; sleepless nights if her finger aches; torturing doubts if another fellow is over-zealous in finding her shawls—from all these troubles I am exempt. My domestic life leaves me nothing to fret about. Like that young man in Longfellow’s poem,— “‘Light-hearted and content, I wander through the world;’ only I do not carry two locks of hair about with me and sentimentalize concerning them, so that in one respect I have an advantage over the widower.” “If your wife were in heaven, I do not think you would carry one of her curls done up in note-paper in your left-hand waistcoat pocket, after the fashion of a man I once knew,” remarked Mr. Stewart a little grimly.