, at least,
have nothing but pleasure in the anticipation; no lovely wife behind; no
charming babes to fret and be fretted for, eh?"

"Vara true," said the doctor, who was mated with a _tartar_, "ye maun have
less regrets at leaving hame; but a married man is no' entirely denied his
ain consolations."

"Good sense in that," said the skipper; "a wide berth and plenty of sea
room are not bad things now and then."

"Is that your experience also?" said Power, with a knowing look. "Come,
come, Adjutant, we're not so ill off, you see; but, by Jove, I can't
imagine how it is a man ever comes to thirty without having at least one
wife,--without counting his colonial possessions of course."

"Yes," said the adjutant, with a sigh, as he drained his glass to the
bottom. "It is devilish strange,--woman, lovely woman!" Here he filled and
drank again, as though he had been proposing a toast for his own peculiar
drinking.

"I say, now," resumed Power, catching at once that there was something
working in his mind,--"I say, now, how happened it that you, a right
good-looking, soldier-like fellow, that always made his way among the fair
ones, with that confounded roguish eye and slippery tongue,--how the deuce
did it come to pass that you never married?"

"I've been more than once on the verge of it," said the adjutant, smiling
blandly at the flattery.

"And nae bad notion yours just to stay there," said the doctor, with a very
peculiar contortion of countenance.

"No pleasing you, no contenting a fellow like you," said Power, returning
to the charge; "that's the thing; you get a certain ascendancy; you have a
kind of success that renders you, as the French say, _tete montee_, and you
think no woman rich enough or good-looking enough or big enough."

"No; by Jove you're wrong," said the adjutant, swallowing the bait, hook
and all,--"quite wrong there; for some how, all my life, I was decidedly
susceptible. Not that I cared much for your blushing sixteen, or budding
beauties in white muslin, fresh from a back-board and a governess; no, my
taste inclined rather to the more sober charms of two or three-and-thirty,
the _embonpoint_, a good foot and ankle, a sensible breadth about the
shoulders--"

"Somewhat Dutch-like, I take it," said the skipper, puffing out a volume of
smoke; "a little bluff in the bows, and great stowage, eh?"

"You leaned then towards the widows?" said Power.

"Exactly; I confess, a widow always was my wea