f his first
wife, and his second wife, and the young lady, and partridges, and
oysters, and brandy-and-water, and disinterested attachments.

The next morning, John Dounce was rather feverish with the extra
brandy-and-water of the previous night; and, partly in the hope of
cooling himself with an oyster, and partly with the view of ascertaining
whether he owed the young lady anything, or not, went back to the
oyster-shop. If the young lady had appeared beautiful by night, she was
perfectly irresistible by day; and, from this time forward, a change came
over the spirit of John Dounce's dream. He bought shirt-pins; wore a
ring on his third finger; read poetry; bribed a cheap miniature-painter
to perpetrate a faint resemblance to a youthful face, with a curtain over
his head, six large books in the background, and an open country in the
distance (this he called his portrait); 'went on' altogether in such an
uproarious manner, that the three Miss Dounces went off on small
pensions, he having made the tenement in Cursitor-street too warm to
contain them; and in short, comported and demeaned himself in every
respect like an unmitigated old Saracen, as he was.

As to his ancient friends, the other old boys, at the Sir Somebody's
Head, he dropped off from them by gradual degrees; for, even when he did
go there, Jones--vulgar fellow that Jones--persisted in asking 'when it
was to be?' and 'whether he was to have any gloves?' together with other
inquiries of an equally offensive nature: at which not only Harris
laughed, but Jennings also; so, he cut the two, altogether, and attached
himself solely to the blue young lady at the smart oyster-shop.

Now comes the moral of the story--for it has a moral after all. The
last-mentioned young lady, having derived sufficient profit and emolument
from John Dounce's attachment, not only refused, when matters came to a
crisis, to take him for better for worse, but expressly declared, to use
her own forcible words, that she 'wouldn't have him at no price;' and
John Dounce, having lost his old friends, alienated his relations, and
rendered himself ridiculous to everybody, made offers successively to a
schoolmistress, a landlady, a feminine tobacconist, and a housekeeper;
and, being directly rejected by each and every of them, was accepted by
his cook, with whom he now lives, a henpecked husband, a melancholy
monument of antiquated misery, and a living warning to all uxorious old
boys.