Now it is quite true that people may have a perfect agreement and sympathy in their higher intellectual nature,--may like the same books, quote the same poetry, agree in the same principles, be united in the same religion,--and nevertheless, when they come together in the simplest affair of every-day business, may find themselves jarring and impinging upon each other at every step, simply because there are to each person, in respect of daily personal habits and personal likes and dislikes, a thousand little individualities with which reason has nothing to do, which are not subjects for the use of logic, and to which they never think of applying the power of religion,--which can only be set down as the positive ultimate facts of existence with two people. Suppose a blue-jay courts and wins and weds a Baltimore oriole. During courtship there may have been delightful sympathetic conversation on the charm of being free birds, the felicity of soaring in the blue summer air. Mr. Jay may have been all humility and all ecstasy in comparing the discordant screech of his own note with the warbling tenderness of Miss Oriole. But, once united, the two commence business relations. He is firmly convinced that a nest built among the reeds of a marsh is the only reasonable nest for a bird; she is positive that she should die there in a month of damp and rheumatism. She never heard of going to housekeeping in anything but a nice little pendulous bag swinging down from under the branches of a breezy elm; he is sure he should have water on the brain before summer was over, from constant vertigo, in such swaying, unsteady quarters,--he would be a sea-sick blue-jay on land, and he cannot think of it. She knows now he don’t love her, or he never would think of shutting her up in an old mouldy nest where she is sure she shall have the chills; and _he_ knows she doesn’t love him, or she never would want to make him uncomfortable all his days by tilting and swinging him about as no decent bird ought to be swung. Both are dead-set in their own way and opinion; and how is either to be convinced that the way which seemeth right unto the other is not best? Nature knows this, and therefore, in her feathered tribes, blue-jays do not mate with orioles; and so bird-housekeeping goes on in peace. But men and women as diverse in their physical tastes and habits as blue-jays and orioles are wooing and wedding every day, and coming to the business of nest-building, _alias_ housekeeping, with predilections as violent, and as incapable of any logical defence, as the oriole’s partiality for a swing-nest and the jay’s preference of a nest among the reeds.