As a spectator, Peter Easy would not have objected to remain in this splendid establishment of domestic misery, with the view of obtaining some practical knowledge of matrimonial life. He had not ventured out of single blessedness himself, for which he never gave any other reason than that he had been predestinated a bachelor. In this he was believed by many of the villagers, but others continued to maintain that his single blessedness was simply owing to his aversion to the trouble necessarily encountered in visiting and courting for a wife. To this he would only reply, that although he could not, like the old Thracians and Assyrians, rise from his bed in the morning, attend the market with his purse, and return in the evening with one of the fairest and most enchanting maids in the kingdom; nor coolly exchange, for a lovely and bewitching partner, “one hundred and twenty pounds of tobacco, cash,” the value of the best article, as was the practice of his good-natured ancestors, he yet lived in an age affording equal if not greater matrimonial facilities. “Now,” he would declare, “no little of the labor of visiting and courting is voluntarily assumed by the ladies themselves, through ten thousand modest expedients which their ingenuity has invented; and should this prove insufficient, why, it is the easiest matter in the world to pick up a wife on any day of the year upon any highway in the country.” Concluding his bachelor prejudices to be real, they quite naturally induced him to believe that in the domestic affairs of this magnificent mansion, he could see the fruits and consequences of marriage in their true and proper light. Fortune, however, was inclined to deal more favorably with him, and his attention was arrested by a handsome young man who hurried from the building as if anxious to escape the unpleasant sounds of the voice within. Peter followed him as he walked leisurely and contentedly along, until he came to his residence, which was a small, yet handsomely arranged and neatly furnished building. As the young man opened the door, his pretty young wife was the first to meet and welcome him with her cheerful countenance and happy smiles, and then they so lovingly embraced each other, that Peter’s heart, though long a stranger to such feelings, impulsively began to respond to theirs. He turned away, perhaps to check its beatings, but now affirms he did so simply to resolve this astounding mystery; for it was his firm conviction, based upon his own extensive observation, that marriages were formed with no other design than that of providing for the parties a proper and convenient person with whom to fight and quarrel whenever inclination prompted. “It was well to turn away,” replied the pert young lady before alluded to, “for your eyes should never be permitted to feast upon so holy a scene. Like all of your bachelor kin, you ‘are not worthy to see a man first in the morning,’ as the saying of the Benjins used to have it.