girl was clearly perplexed. She stared at me a space, then said,
"What have wooings long or short to do with weddings? You talk as if
you did your wooing first and then came to marriage--we get married
first and woo afterwards!"

"'Tis not a bad idea, and I can see it might lend an ease and certainty
to the pastime which our method lacks. But if the woman is got first
and sued subsequently, who brings you together? Who sees to the
essential preliminaries of assortment?"

An, looking at my shoes as though she speculated on the remoteness of
the journey I had come if it were measured by my ignorance, replied,
"The urn, stranger, the urn does that--what else? How it may be in
that out-fashioned region you have come from I cannot tell, but
here--'tis so commonplace I should have thought you must have known
it--we put each new year the names of all womenkind into an urn and the
men draw for them, each town, each village by itself, and those they
draw are theirs; is it conceivable your race has other methods?"

I told her it was so--we picked and chose for ourselves, beseeching the
damsels, fighting for them, and holding the sun of romance was at its
setting just where the Martians held it to rise. Whereat An burst out
laughing--a clear, ringing laugh that set all the light-hearted folk in
the nearest boats laughing in sympathy. But when the grotesqueness of
the idea had somewhat worn off, she turned grave and asked me if such a
fancy did not lead to spite, envy, and bickerings. "Why, it seems to
me," she said, shaking her curly head, "such a plan might fire cities,
desolate plains, and empty palaces--"

"Such things have been."

"Ah! our way is much the better. See!" quoth that gentle philosopher.
"'Here,' one of our women would say, 'am I to-day, unwed, as free of
thought as yonder bird chasing the catkin down; tomorrow I shall be
married, with a whole summer to make love in, relieved at one bound of
all those uncertainties you acknowledge to, with nothing to do but lie
about on sunny banks with him whom chance sends me, come to the goal of
love without any travelling to get there.' Why, you must acknowledge
this is the perfection of ease."

"But supposing," I said, "chance dealt unkindly to you from your
nuptial urn, supposing the man was not to your liking, or another
coveted him?" To which An answered, with some shrewdness--

"In the first case we should do what we might, being no worse off than
those