How I shall pet the little clipper. I’ll marry a blue-eyed woman: they are the most affectionate. She must not be too tall: a man’s wife shouldn’t _look down_ upon him. She must not know too much: the Furies take your pert, catamount-y, scribbling women, with a repartee always rolled up under their tongues. She mustn’t be over seventeen: but how to find that out, Sam, is the question: it is about as easy as to make an editor tell you the truth about his subscription list. She must be handsome--no she mustn’t either. I should be as jealous as Blue Beard. All the corkscrew, pantalooned, perfumed popinjays would be ogling her. But then, again, there’s three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, and three times a day I must sit opposite that connubial face, at the table. What’s to be done? Yes; she _must_ be handsome: that is as certain as that Louis Napoleon has a Jewish horror of _Ham_. Wonder if wives are expensive articles? Wonder if their “little hands were ever made to scratch out husbands’ eyes?” Wonder if Caudle lectures are “all in your eye,” or--occasionally in your ear? Wonder if babies invariably prefer the night-time to cry? To marry or not to marry, Sam? Whether ’tis better to go buttonless, and to shiver, or marry and be always in hot water? There’s Tom Hillot. Tom’s married. I was his groomsman. I would have given a small fortune to have been in his white satin vest--what with the music, and the roses, and the pretty little bridesmaid! Didn’t the bride look bewitching, with the rose-flush on her cheek and the tear on her eyelash? And how provokingly happy Tom looked, when he whirled off with her in the carriage to their new home; and what a pretty little home it was, to be sure. It is just a year to-day since they were married. I dined there yesterday. It strikes me that Tom don’t joke as much as he used in his bachelor days; and then he has a way, too, of leaving his sentences unfinished. And I noticed that his wife often touched his foot with her slipper under the table. What do you suppose she did that for? Just as I was buttoning up my coat to come away, I asked Tom if he would go to up Tammany Hall with me. He looked at his wife, and she said, “Oh--_go_ by all means, Mr. Hillot;” when Tom immediately declined. I don’t understand matrimonial tactics; but it seems to me he ought to have obliged her.