This, then, is my case. I have thrown upon my canvas a young person who has had the misfortune to fall in love with a man of whom she may be fairly said to know nothing. (Her feminine intuitions cannot, of course, pass muster as knowledge with us Bushwhackers and philosophers.) And this young person, so far as is made to appear, is anxious to know but one thing in regard to her lover. Had she been a good sensible girl, with no nonsense about her, it might have been supposed that she would have been curious to know whether he were rich. Then, being but just turned of eighteen, who could have blamed her if she had wondered whether he were of a jealous temper, and likely to put an end to her dancing with other men? Again; many women have a pardonable ambition to shine in the eyes of their friends; and was he, if rich, generous as well? And was she likely to dazzle Alice with her diamonds, perhaps, or beam upon Lucy from a handsome equipage? He had shown, too, some fondness for field sports, and would he—ah, would he (harrowing thought to every truly feminine bosom)—would he bring her into the country, there to drag out a weary, dreary life, and shoppinglessly vegetate? Nay, was this splendid creature (as is too often the case with splendid creatures), was he, perhaps, a slave to creature comforts? Would he be an exacting critic of her housekeeping? Might not muddy coffee exacerbate even an heroic soul? Could it be that a roast not done to a turn might corrugate that admirable brow? No; we have not painted her as anxious in respect to any of these things. Yet I beg the reader will not accuse me of drawing a monstrosity of a girl, one destitute of the common instincts of her sex. Far from it. She, very likely, trusting implicitly to her intuitions (as women will), felt too confident as to these possibilities of her future to give them a second thought. Besides, was she not desperately in love? And we all know (or, at least, _I_ believe, which amounts to the same thing, so far as this book is concerned) that there are women who, if but deeply enamoured, would scorn such thoughts, as a degradation to true love. At any rate, the fact was as I have stated it. Mary, while seemingly careless (though that may have been due to confidence) as to the mere details of her destiny in this world, was morbidly solicitous touching her lover’s views as to the next. Laugh not, gentle reader. True, I am a humoristic Bushwhacker by trade; but I would not have you smile out of order. And as for thee, my great-to-the-tenth-power-grandson, brush the wrinkles from thy yellow brow, lest thou crack, not this nut, but thine addled pate, instead. Know, then, all men (and by all men I mean, of course, all women and clergymen, who, alone, in these busy days, have leisure to read symphonic monographs)—