when I go out lookin' for a fifth. Naw, suh; if Mary dies, pure
shame will keep me a widower to my death."

"Thar ain't but one thing sartain about marriage, in my mind,"
commented Matthew Field, "an' that is that it gits most of its
colour from the distance that comes between. The more your mouth
waters for a woman, the likelier 'tis that 'tain't the woman for
you--that's my way of thinkin'. The woman a man don't git somehow
is always the woman he ought to have had. It's a curious,
mixed-up business, however you look at it."

"That's so," said Tom Spade; "I always noticed it. The woman who
is your wife may be a bouncin' beauty, an' the woman who ain't
may be as ugly as sin, but you'd go twice as far to kiss her all
the same. Thar is always a sight more spice about the woman who
ain't."

"Jest look at Eliza, now," pursued Matthew, wrapped in the
thought of his own domestic infelicities. "What I could never
understand about Eliza was that John Sales went clean to the dogs
because he couldn't git her. To think of sech a thing happenin',
jest as if I was to blame, when if I'd only known it I could hev
turned about an' taken her sister Lizzie. Thar were five of 'em
in all, an' I settled on Eliza, as it was, with my eyes
blindfold. Poor John--poor John! It was sech a terrible waste of
wantin'."

"Well, it's a thing to stiddy about," said old Jacob, with a
sigh. "They tell me now that that po' young gal of Bill
Fletcher's has found it a thorny bed, to be sho'. Her letters are