Do you remember that lonely graveyard in the woods, relic of some community of early settlers? "I'd as soon be dead and lying there as live the life you want me to live!" said I, with a would-be wise nod of the head as I drove past. But now I see too well that you were the wise one. Why didn't Nature make me understand myself as I begin to understand now? There must have been the same heart-searching perfume in the woods that night--a blend of locust bloom with wild roses and the bitter-sweet tang of young fox-grape tendrils swinging high among the tree branches. Yet I could do no better than expound to you my dry-as-dust opinions on marriage. Women, according to me, had only one way of making a man happy, and thirty thousand ways of torturing him. I wanted to have inscribed on my tombstone: "What did he do for the good of womankind? He remained a bachelor." Most husbands and wives, I thought, had the air of being married to foreigners whose mentality they could never quite touch. I believed that I was cut out for a bad husband, a disappointing friend, an irritating acquaintance, and that the ends of the earth were the only happy hunting grounds for a wild spirit like mine--places where I could freely dive far down under the surface of myself and swim at ease. Birds in the hand had no brightness of plumage for me. They were always moulting. I coveted the ones that sang farthest away in the bush. "Why have a mad desire to become an ancestor for people you don't know and may dislike?" I think I remember inquiring of you, as you sagely dilated--at ancient Smithtown--on the notable achievements of a certain Bull Rider Smith for the benefits of his posterity. He was doubtless a smart business man and a good sportsman, to gallop so far and fast on such an animal, when told he could have all the road he could ride round on bull-back in the course of a day. But to me his ambitions seemed futile, and the whole of Long Island less important than a flyspeck on the map of the world. Now, I shouldn't mind spending my life here, even in _the_ house, though I should prefer an old one; and the Smithtown church with its Cyclopian eye of a clock in a tall Puritanical steeple would exactly suit me to be married in.