I had just carefully deposited upon a velvety tuft of grass Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor." I had arrived at the conclusion that its pages should be part and parcel of the landscape about. Surely there is a unison between them both. There are always certain places where only certain melodies can be sung to the proper harmony of the heart-strings. Who ever learned "Thanatopsis" on the summit of the Catskills, and afterwards forgot a line of it? Now I have seen these same "Reveries" of the said bachelor upon many a centre-table: in the lap of many a town beauty, half cushioned in the velvet of a drawing room sofa: but the latter half of the volume never looked so inviting as it does here just in the middle of one of nature's lexicons. May the page of it never be blurred. Reveries of a Bachelor! 'Tis a sugared pill of a title. Its morals are sad will o' wisps. And if the definition "that happiness consists in the search after it" be true, it is so when the definition settles itself on the mind of a bachelor. Hath _he_ reveries half so sweet for morsels under the tongues of memory and fancy as those which come nigh to the brain of the married man? As sure as the lesser is always included in the greater: as certain as the maxim _de minimis lex non curat_: the reveries of the first are but bound up in the reveries of the last; one is a _pleasing_ romance, the other its enchanting sequel. What is that yonder? There is a merry-faced form in the distant haze, shaking a dreamy negative with his head. A head whose reality is miles and miles away, airing its brow of single blessedness in foreign travel. Let us argue the point: he smiles as if willing. Man socially is at least a three volumed work: however much longer the James-like pen of destiny may extend him. Volume first--bachelor. Volume second--husband. Volume third--father. There _may_ be a dozen more--there _should_ be none less. You have been a bachelor: you are a husband and a father. You always had, perhaps, a bump of self-esteem attractive to the digits of Fowler. You never believed half so well of yourself as when one morning at your business you were first asked concerning the well being of your _family_. At the moment, you were in a fog, like the young attorney upon the first question of his first examination: next, memory rallied and your face brightened; your stature increased as you replied. You felt you were going up in the social numeration table of life. Two years ago you were a unit: you next counted your importance by tens over the parson's shoulder; when your child was born you felt that the leap to hundreds in the scale was far from enough and should have been higher.