"So am _I_," said I to myself, as the door closed on my face--"finished unutterably." It occurred to me I was turned out of the house; and the suspicion was soon very perfectly confirmed. I called on the fair Miss Smith the next day, and, though I saw her by accident through the window, I was met by the cursed fib--"not at home." The same thing was told me seven days in succession, and on the eighth I saw, to my eternal wo and despair, her marriage with my Boston rival announced in the papers. He lives in Philadelphia, and can confirm my story. But this is anticipating my narrative. "I say, Dawkins," cried my cousin Sammy (I had cured him of the vulgar 'Ikey'), "what does the old codger say?" These words, bawled by the rustic from the carriage window, woke me from a trance into which I had fallen, the moment Mr. Periwinkle Smith shut the door in my face. "Didn't he say there was a house over the way?" I remembered the words,--my own house for sale! I knew it well; it was just the thing wanted,--an elegant house, provided genteel people were in it. I was on the point of running over and securing it, when I remembered Mrs. Higginson. A cold sweat bedewed my limbs. "No!" said I, "I will go to Tim Doolittle--I can face _him_." To make matters short--for I have a long story to tell--I drove up to Higginson's brewery (it is now Doolittle and Snagg's, or was, when I heard last of it), saw my late brother-in-law, whom I thought a very plebeian body, and made such progress with him, that in three days' time (for my Margaret had gone to mourn in the country) the house changed owners, and my uncle Wilkins marched into it as master, followed by Sammy and Pattie. CHAPTER XVI. CONTAINING MUCH INSTRUCTIVE MATTER IN RELATION TO GOOD SOCIETY, WHEREBY THE AMBITIOUS READER CAN DETERMINE WHAT ARE HIS PROSPECTS OF ENTERING IT. Three days after I had established my uncle in his new house, the fair Miss Smith was married. It was a great blow to me, and I mused with melancholy on the fickleness of the sex, wondering what it was in woman's nature that enabled her so easily to change from one love to another. I considered myself very badly used; and the more I thought of the wedding-present, and the seventy thousand dollars in bonds and mortgages, the more deeply did I feel my loss. I read the announcement of her marriage in the newspaper, cursed her inconstancy and hard-heartedness, and gave myself up to grief the whole morning. She had certainly used me ill, but by dinner-time I remembered I had served her pretty much in the same way. Besides, my cousin Pattie (I always dined with my uncle Wilkins, of course, and intended soon to live with him altogether) looked uncommonly handsome, and "Who knows," said I to myself, "whether she won't have _more_ than Miss Smith, after all?" In addition to this great consolation, I had another in a few days; and the two together quite comforted me for the loss of Periwinkle's daughter. But of this in its place.