Now, it happened that this same Gustavus, after almost all the sap of his body had been eliminated by fighting, and there seemed to be scarcely enough left to lubricate the muscles that stretched from promontory to point of his big bones, like tough hausers, took it into his head to wish for a wife. We doubt if all the physiologists or psychologists that ever hunted for traces of the spirit among the white guts of the head could tell how such an idea came into such an extraordinary place; and if his heart was as dry as the voluntary muscles of his body, nothing short of a dislocation of Cupid’s right arm could ever have sent into such a leathery organ the tickling shaft. True, however, it is as death, that Gustavus did actually fall in love, and the symptoms were just as extraordinary as the passion itself; for there never was heard in any man’s lungs before, such a rattle of sighs; and as for the length of his jaws, the never a rough wood-cut of John Bunyan’s hero in the Slough of Despond could come within many degrees of their lugubrious longitude. It is even true that the power of the tender passion reached to his stomach—a place of all others that might _a priori_ have been considered perfectly independent of all moral impulses whatsomever. Nothing before, except hunger itself, had ever affected that organ; and, indeed, ensconced behind and between, and beneath such ribs, nothing short of death itself might have been supposed capable of reaching it, or subduing its tough hide, its viscous linings, and its gastric juice, stronger than the best gin that ever was made at Schiedam.