inference?"

Even Lucy Fountain saw many young ladies healed of many young
enthusiasms by a wedding-ring,--but a wittier woman has said it better,
Una declares, in asserting that a married woman's name is her epitaph.
If, however, Mr. Reade's opinion of womankind is at any time
justifiable, we must bring Una to witness that it is so in the following
instance:--

"Realize the situation, and the strange incongruity between the
senses and the mind in these poor fellows! The day had ripened its
beauty; beneath a purple heaven shone, sparkled, and laughed a
blue sea, in whose waves the tropical sun seemed to have fused his
beams; and beneath that fair, sinless, peaceful sky, wafted by a
balmy breeze over those smiling, transparent, golden waves, a
bloodthirsty pirate bore down on them with a crew of human tigers;
and a lady babble babble babble babble babble babbled in their
quivering ears!"

We have heard numberless inquiries as to Mr. Reade's private life, with
which, whether they have the right or not, the public will concern
itself. So at home is he on every subject that each appears to be his
specialty. One asserts that he follows Galen: witness his mania on
medicine. Certainly not, another replies; are not his principles
erroneous, and second-hand at that? Does he not dredge the science with
ridicule? No practitioner would gravely assert the feasibility of
transfusion, an operation never yet performed with success, since the
red globules of his own blood seem to be as proper to each individual as
his identity, and allow no admixture from alien veins; in surgery he has
but one foe,--phlebotomy; in pharmacy, but one friend,--chloroform; he
asserts of Dr. Sampson, (Dr. Dickson, the writer of "Fallacies of the
Faculty"?) that "he was strong, but not strong enough to make the
populace suspend an opinion; yet it might be done: by chloroforming
them." (Which leads one parenthetically to remark that it is great pity,
then, that, in the prevalent headlong precipitancy of public judgment,
anaesthetics have not been more generally employed on this side of the
water of late.) Certainly he is no physician, they say. But, on the
other hand, a conjecture that he has been before the mast is as
plausible a one as that ever Herman Melville was; there is the true
sailor's-roll about him; nobody less skilful than the captain of a
three-decker could have run the Agra through such a gantlet of
broads