I cannot say that the bathing in the salt-sea waves was not a failure as a matrimonial speculation; but that is my luck. In some respects, the future to me is like a mirage--I put my hand out hopefully, and grasp nothing but fog. That bathing-master was a fine-looking man until he opened his mouth and attempted to sit down on a chair. He created a pleasant delusion in my bosom for a few moments, and then--well, we will say nothing more about that--the private sanctuary of a female woman's thoughts are too sacred for a Report. If I wept in the stillness of the night, no one but the angel that records broken love-dreams will ever know of it. With this precious angel I am in full sympathy. He has done too much of that kind of writing for me not to feel the cruel pangs of the long list of disappointments with which his books are blotted. Well, I arose the next morning after my experimental bath, heavy-eyed, heavy-hearted, and altogether blue as indigo. Cousin Dempster saw this, and his generous heart seized upon a remedy. "Let us go down to Pleasure Bay," says he. "What do you think of a day's crabbing?" "Crabbing?" says I, "just as if I didn't feel crabbed enough already. Do you want me to keep it up all day?" Dempster laughed; so did E. E.; just as if I'd said something awful funny, which I wasn't in the least conscious of, not having a spark of fun left in me since that salt-water deluge and its consequences. "Oh," says he, as good-natured as pie, "there is nothing like Pleasure Bay when one has the blues--a lunch under the trees, and a boat before the breeze." I stopped him; the dear, good fellow was launching off into poetry without knowing it; association with genins is doing everything with him. There is no knowing where he might have ended, if I hadn't lifted my forefinger, for a whole gust of poetry was riling up in his earthly nature like yeast in a baking of bread. "I'll go to Pleasure Bay," says I, "but, for goodness sake, don't try that sort of thing again; genius isn't catching, and though you have married into our family, don't expect that it will spread like an epidemic into yours, because it won't." "Why not?" says he; "is there nothing in association?" "Well, I can't exactly decide," says I; "strange things do happen in that direction. I have heard of young women marrying literary men who never wrote a line worth reading before, who burst out into full-blown geniuses right in the honeymoon. But it is wonderful how much their style was like their husbands'. Of course, those must be cases of especial affinity. When a woman has ransacked a poor fellow's heart, she naturally begins to pillage his brain, and I reckon he must like it at first; but after that, he subsides into himself, and she subsides into herself, and somehow she writes just as she did before, and so does he!"