imony. Yet I was once very near it. I courted a young
woman in my twenty-seventh year,--for so early I began to feel symptoms
of the tender passion! She was well to do in the world, as they call
it, but yet not such a fortune as, all things considered, perhaps I
might have pretended to. It was not my own choice altogether; but my
mother very strongly pressed me to it. She was always putting it to me,
that I "had comings-in sufficient,--that I need not stand upon a
portion"; though the young woman, to do her justice, had considerable
expectations, which yet did not quite come up to my mark, as I told you
before. She had this saying always in her mouth: that I "had money
enough; that it was time I enlarged my housekeeping, and to show a
spirit befitting my circumstances." In short, what with her
importunities, and my own desires _in part_ cooeperating,--for, as I
said, I was not yet quite twenty-seven, a time when the youthful
feelings may be pardoned, if they show a little impetuosity,--I
resolved, I say, upon all these considerations, to set about the
business of courting in right earnest. I was a young man then, and
having a spice of romance in my character, (as the reader doubtless has
observed long ago,) such as that sex is apt to be taken with, I had
reason in no long time to think my addresses were anything but
disagreeable.

Certainly the happiest part of a young man's life is the time when he is
going a-courting. All the generous impulses are then awake, and he feels
a double existence in participating his hopes and wishes with another
being. Return yet again for a brief moment, ye visionary views,
transient enchantments! ye moonlight rambles with Cleora in the Silent
Walk at Vauxhall,--(N.B.--About a mile from Birmingham, and resembling
the gardens of that name near London, only that the price of admission
is lower,)--when the nightingale has suspended her notes in June to
listen to our loving discourses, while the moon was overhead! (for we
generally used to take our tea at Cleora's mother's before we set out,
not so much to save expenses as to avoid the publicity of a repast in
the gardens,--coming in much about the time of half-price, as they call
it)--ye soft intercommunions of soul, when, exchanging mutual vows, we
prattled of coming felicities! The loving disputes we have had under
those trees, when this house (planning our future settlement) was
rejected, because, though cheap, it was dull, and the other