The sun shone on—in less time than he could possibly have anticipated—ten thousand was at his command. Very good, thought he; this, with ten or fifteen thousand more, as a premium for encumbering myself with a comforter of the snarling sex—for the ungallant Jasper had a thoroughly mercantile business man’s opinion of the angelic species—will be sufficient. I must investigate. So he set out on a tour of the watering-places, and such like wife-markets, where Cupid, the most wide-awake of auctioneers—it’s a libel to say he’s blind—knocks the little darlings down to the highest bidder. Of course, Jasper stopped at the first-class hotels, where he scrutinized the _habitués_ of the ladies ordinary with uncommon interest. There’s no use in disguising the fact, he sought not a wife, but a fortune; in extenuation, allow me to say, he was not at all singular, there are plenty of those individuals extant, young, tolerably good-looking fellows, _bien gante_, and redolent of whisker, who linger about the ladies’ drawing-room, in the faint hope of fascinating something available, (prudent maternity avoids this class with pious horror,) middle aged beaux, who dress sedulously, and toady _chaperons_, carry fans, are always _so_ attentive and so obliging, dine regularly, and affect a Burgundy decanter, which looks easy circumstanced, but which the poor waiter is tired of carrying backward and forward, ticketed some hundred and something. These animals are generally great scandal-mongers, and always dangerous, sweet-voiced but adder-tongued, their _modus operandi_ is to poison the ear of the person addressed, against any other individual, hoping thereby to elevate their own characters upon the slaughtered heap. Let no woman suffer such pestilent breath to be a second time breathed within her hearing. Jasper, though indefatigable as you may well suppose, met with strange adventure during his wife-hunt. Pretty women, after short experience, he avoided utterly, for he found that they were usually too extravagant in their expectations with regard to _personnel_, and as Jasper could not, by any stretch of his imagination, fancy that he ranked in the category of Fredericks and Augustuses, he endeavored to make up the deficiency by a liberal display of wealth-prefiguring ornament, a kind of strong-box index, which he shrewdly suspected might tempt some ambitious innocent to investigate the contents thereof.