The binary base, therefore, is here proposed, as the only proper base for gradation; and the octonal, as the true commercial base, for numeration and notation: two bases which in combination form a binoctonal system that is at once simple, comprehensive, and efficient. MY LAST LOVE. I had counted many more in my girlhood, in the first flush of blossoming,--and a few, good men and true, whom I never meet even now without an added color; for, at one time or another, I thought I loved each of them. "Why didn't I marry them, then?" For the same reason that many another woman does not. We are afraid to trust our own likings. Too many of them are but sunrise vapors, very rosy to begin with, but by mid-day as dingy as any old dead cloud with the rain all shed out of it. I never see any of those old swains of mine, without feeling profoundly thankful that I don't belong to him. I shouldn't want to look over my husband's head in any sense. So they all got wives and children, and I lived an old maid,--although I was scarcely conscious of the state; for, if my own eyes or other people's testimony were to be trusted, I didn't look old, and I'm quite sure I didn't feel so. But I came to myself on my thirty-second birthday, an old maid most truly, without benefit of clergy. And thereby hangs this tale; for on that birthday I first made acquaintance with my last love. Something like a month before, there had come to Huntsville two gentlemen in search of game and quiet quarters for the summer. They soon found that a hotel in a country village affords little seclusion; but the woods were full of game, the mountain-brooks swarmed with trout too fine to be given up, and they decided to take a house of their own. After some search, they fixed on an old house, (I've forgotten whose "folly" it was called,) full a mile and a half from town, standing upon a mossy hill that bounded my fields, square and stiff and weather-beaten, and without any protection except a ragged pine-tree that thrust its huge limbs beneath the empty windows, as though it were running away with a stolen house under its arm. The place was musty, rat-eaten, and tenanted by a couple of ghosts, who thought a fever, once quite fatal within the walls, no suitable discharge from the property, and made themselves perfectly free of the quarters in properly weird seasons. But money and labor cleared out all the cobwebs, (for ghosts are but spiritual cobwebs, you know,) and the old house soon wore a charming air of rustic comfort.