philosophers like myself are apt to find our ratiocinations wofully mixed when we try to reason about the matter. You remember, perhaps, that Josephine induced me earlier in our wedded life to give a large party for her sister Julia? Within a year I have submitted to a similar domestic upheaval on account of my elder daughter, and I do not think that it can be said that I acquitted myself in either case malignantly or even morosely. Indeed, though this is not strictly relevant to the discussion, my wife informed me after Josie's party was over that I had behaved like an angel. Now, my sister-in-law, Julia, is still unmarried, and she cannot be far from thirty. As I reflected at the time she came out, she is less comely than my wife and not so sagacious, but she is decidedly an attractive girl. She has had every advantage in the line of social entertainments, and every opportunity to meet available young men. She has waltzed all winter and been successively to Bar Harbor and Newport in summer. She has been to Europe so as to let people forget her and to reappear as a novelty, and she has altered the shape of her hair twice to my individual observation. Yet somehow she hangs fire. I am informed by Josephine, in strict confidence, that she has had offers and might have been married to at least one eminently desirable man before this had she seen fit to accept him; but I tell my darling that though the consciousness of what might have been may be a legitimate consolation to her and to her sister, it does not controvert the bald fact that Julia is still unmarried at the end of ten years of social divagations.