Having been a bachelor from my earliest youth I suppose I ought to be accustomed to the condition; but the fact remains that I miss something--something which only a wedding supplies. Curiously enough this want is not a wife. I have been without one so long that I should not know what to do with her if I had one. I should probably overlook her, and she would become atrophied or die of neglect or thirst. Neither do I crave a home of my own; nor golden-haired children to climb up my knee. I can do without these accessories. But what I do hunger for and what I _will_ have is a trousseau. Why the acquisition of a trousseau should be a purely feminine prerogative I have never been able to understand. A bride without a trousseau is generally regarded as an incomplete thing--a poached-egg without toast; a salad without dressing. But the bridegroom without a trousseau is a recognised institution. True, he has new clothes, both seen and unseen, but this is not a trousseau; it is merely a "replenishment of his wardrobe." His least disreputable old things are "made to do"; and nobody thinks slightingly of him if he attends his wedding in a re-cuffed shirt or in boots that have been re-soled. A girl, however, would as soon think of entering Paradise with a second-hand halo as she would contemplate being married in anything that was not aggressively new. Thus it is that before my wish can be consummated I have two honoured conventions to defy: that only a girl may possess a trousseau, and that a marriage is a necessary condition to the acquiring of it. Fortunately I am strong-minded. A long course of Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD'S homilies has given me no little facility in achieving this attribute, and I am determined that I will change neither my sex nor my status. Now, I have prepared a list, just as--I suppose--every girl does. In the first place I am going to indulge in the hitherto undreamt-of luxury of a surfeit of dress-shirts. No one who has not experienced life on two dress-shirts--one in wear, the other in the wash--can quite understand what this will mean to me. Men like Sir JOSEPH BEECHAM, Mr. MALLABY-DEELEY, Mr. SOLLY JOEL, Lord HOWARD DE WALDEN, and others, who, I daresay, have four or even five, cannot know what it is to feel that their evening's refreshment and entertainment depend on their finding the French chalk or the india-rubber.