Miserably Married; I say I "seemed" to gather it, because it "seemed" thy meaning, but as thy whole mode of speech and action is only "seems," I cannot be absolutely sure either of myself or thyself. For thou didst set out an attractive row of various learned propositions, gently, and with the bland solicitude of a hen-wife setting out her choicest eggs for sale, then suddenly and incontinently, and as one in a fit of strangest madness, thou didst sweep them up and fling them aside into airy nothingness without concern for the havoc wrought. Thou didst calmly state what appeared to be a Fact, reasonable and graspable; and with all the powers of my being I seized upon it as a grateful thing and good for consideration; when suddenly thy senile smile obscured the intellectual horizon, and thy equably modulated voice murmured such words as these: "Not that I desire to imply by any means that this is so, or should be so, but that it might (under certain circumstances, and provided certain minds were at harmony upon the point) probably become so." Ah, thou embodied Confusion worse Confounded! Had it not been for this constant playing of thine at thy favourite shuffling game of cross-purposes, I should have roused my soul from its stupor of forced attention to demand of thee more of thy profound Bible scholarship. Whether, for example, if Divorce, thy bugbear, were ungodly, and the Bible true, a man should not have two, three, nay, half-a-dozen wives at his pleasure for as long or as short a time as he chose, and find situations for them afterwards as servants, telegraph-clerks, and bookkeepers, when their beauty was gone and snappishness of temper had taken the place of endearing docility. Whether English harem-life, lately set in vogue by certain great and distinguished "Upper" people, could not be easily proved pleasing unto the Most High Jehovah? For did not God love His servant Abraham? and did not Abraham bestow his affections on Sarai and Hagar? and when the hoary old reprobate was "well stricken in years" and "the Lord had blessed him in all things" did he not again take a wife named Keturah, who presented him in his centenarian decrepitude with six sons?--all "fine babies," no doubt. What sayest thou to these morals of Holy Writ, thou "many-sounding" mouthpiece of opinion? Answer me on a postcard, for with thee, more than with any other man, should brevity be the soul of wit!