80 THE RELATION THAT TOOK A LIKING TO ME. 



every body unconcerned. To hear one described is, in my opinion, 

 tantamount to standing by while a person sucks sugar. 



At the end of six months we agreed that nothing better could be 

 done than making up a marriage between us; but from that un- 

 lucky moment I felt most severely the real curse of deafness. I 

 would have given half my fortune if my intended mother-in-law could 

 have had better ears. If, good reader, you have yourself either been 

 upon the eve of marriage, or had a daughter to tempt any one else 

 upon it, you know that it is a subject not to be bolted on a sudden, 

 like a cannon shot ; there are always some preparatory exercises which 

 cannot be dispensed with hints, inuendos, and expressions/ drifting 

 that way by accident. 



Now, after I had fully agreed with Miss Julia, it took me full two 

 months in breaking the ice to my blessed aunt, and then I had to do 

 it in such a voice that the banns might almost better have been pub- 

 lished thrice at church before an assemblage of the whole parish. In 

 making my intentions known to her I could not but inform the 

 whole neighbourhood out of my own mouth only think of the mi- 

 sery of a bashful man like myself, being obliged to cry out as lustily 

 as a bellman, that I had a desire to make my cousin Julia a woman 

 of the world ! 



Under heaven, I had better caused it to be advertised in the next 

 town's paper, or proclaimed in the market-place ; even then the old 

 lady was not satisfied. She said she objected to the match until she 

 had heard the whole of the arrangements ; and though I gave her to 

 understand that if we waited until she had heard the whole of them, 

 we should die as veritable maid and bachelor as we were born, I 

 could not bring her over. She still insisted on being first made ac- 

 quainted with every tittle of the affair. I was in an agony ; and, 

 while I endeavoured to roar out arrangement, through the thick end 

 of a neat's horn, on one side of her impenetrable head, Miss Julia shot 

 hot water with a syringe into her ear, to make way for the important 

 intelligence on the other. But our labours, like our loves, were in 

 vain, we could not satisfy her pent-up conscience at any price. I 

 might as well have laid my mouth to the earth, and bellowed down 

 to the antipodes. So that at last I am fain, for some time at least, to 

 sit down a disappointed single man. But to beguile my unmarried 

 hours a little, I have drawn up this narrative in very vexation and 

 despair. My miserable heart has but one prayer left in it, and that 

 is if ever I should have the luck to get married, and have a gene- 

 ration of my own, they, every one of them, male, big and little, may 

 have ears as big as blisters, and be saved the ill-luck of going nut- 

 deaf, in preference to getting a fortune. 



