y and have children before they do moustaches;
they are fathers of twins before they are proprietors of two pairs of
pants, and the little girls they marry are old women before they are
twenty years old. Occasionally one of these gosling marriages turns out
all right, but it is a clear case of luck.

If there was a law against young galoots sparking and marrying before
they have all their teeth cut, we suppose the little cusses would evade
it some way, but there ought to be a sentiment against it. It is time
enough for these bantams to think of finding a pullet when they have
raised money enough by their own work to buy a bundle of laths to build
a hen house. But they see a girl who looks cunning, and they are afraid
there is not going to be girls enough to go around, and they begin
their work real spry; and before they are aware of the sanctity of the
marriage relation, they are hitched for life, and before they own a
cook-stove or a bedstead they have to get up in the night and go for a
doctor, so frightened that they run themselves out of breath and abuse
the doctor because he does not run too; and when the doctor gets there
he finds that there is not enough linen in the house to wrap up a doll
baby.

It is about this time that a young man begins to realize that he has
been a colossal fool, as he flies around to heat water and bring in the
bath tub, and as he goes whooping after his mother or her mother, he
turns pale around the gills, his hair turns red in a single night, and
he calls high heaven to witness that if he lives till morning, which
he has doubts about, he will turn over a new leaf and never get married
again until he is older. And in the morning the green-looking "father"
is around before a drug store is open, with no collar on, his hair
sticking every way, his eyes blood-shot and his frame nervous, waiting
for the clerk to open the door so he can get some saffron to make tea
of.

Less than a year ago he thought he was the greatest man there was
anywhere, but he sits there in the house that morning, with his wedding
coat rusty and shiny, his pants frayed at the bottom and patched in the
seat, and the nurse puts in his arm a little bundle of flannel with a
baby hid in it, and he holds it as he would a banana, and as he looks at
his girl wife on the bed, nearly dead from pain and exhaustion, and
he thinks that there are not provisions enough in the house to feed a
canary, a lump comes in his throat and