The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-06-09

In vain do l stand like he-Niobe and, with outstretched arms, implore
 them to halt and consider their latter
 end. The tinkle of piano or guitar, or the ripping tee-hee of maidenly
 merriment comes floating on the per-
 fumed air, and the admonitory roar of a friendly Niagara would be unheard.
 Heedlessly, needlessly scorning in-
 struction, onward they are rushing, surging and pushing down to de-
 struction, or to matrimony, which too often amounts to about the same. The young, the brave, the gay, the grave, the ugly, the. pretty, the silly, the witty, the bril-
 liant, the stupid, all yield to Cupid; all seem resistlessly bound to travel the broad, gudgeon- beaten path that leads to beatific moonshine, white kids and neckties, orange blossoms, altars and mumbling parsons, to vine clad cottages up four pairs of stairs, grocers' bills, wash days, sad biscuits, sloppy coffee, seedy hats, patched elbows, tadey calicoes, drudgery, squalls and variegated un- pleasantnesses. Poor wretches Infat- uated double-uppers! Heaven help theml Everybody says l ought to have been one of them, ought to have joined the missing half hunters, ought to have been Benedict or Maledict, long ago. And I suppose l ought but I have not. You have brought me nearer to it than ever was before.
 Married! To be married And without any of the tangled and troublous preliminaries. What in- finite and diversified tribulations you have spared me by transporting me, in fairy prince or princess fashion, to the alleged elysium of marriage, with out any weary wandering in the laby- rinthine mazes of courtship, or any perilous egg shell navigation of the proverbially damned current of true love which, from the lace cap and rutled- what is-it period of creation's history until now, never did run smooth. The wide world over, it's shallow, bubbling channel has been strewn with rocks and quicksands, cataracts, whirlpools, rapids all headed the wrong way, eddies and sand bars. In every land and cline since Jehovah took that crooked bone from our great t-great- -grandpa's chloroformed side, by which his first sleep became his last repose, the story has been the same. Obstacles, trials, anxieties, maddening jealousies, doubts and mis- understandings beset the lovelorn, courting ninny's way. A stern old daddy's number fourteen stoga boot, with big brass headed nails in the toe, a vixenish prospective mother in- law Q miscarried note or package of tatfy, a crushed bouquet, look, wink, a word, anything, everything, nothing, suffices, has for sixty centuries sufficed, to wiring lovers' and wooers' souls with red-hot dentists tweezers of agony. It is the doom of the whole spoony race. No mortal can escape it, none ever did, none ever will. Adams wooing cost him Eden, and got him kicked over his own garden fence, in bare-skin trousers and fig-leaf round- about, plump into the briar- patches of an unknown world of sin, missiles and cradles. Lots Dulcinea came in a grazer of getting him turned into a Cardiff giant of sacked Turks Island salt and Jacobs courtshipe of Miss Rachel Laban, who bosses the lemonade we'll at every church festival, subjected him to fourteen years of bitter slavery as wet nurse to a herd of he-goats
 while all the other girls in the neigh borhood giggled at him daily from the windows. For the bliss of resting his infatuated pate in the blue-check apron of dusky Delilah's lap, Colonel Samson, the great original lion's-tail twister and jawbone-swinger, allowed himself to be shorn of his wool, hii
 strength and his glory, and played
 blind horse for years in Philistine
 treadmill. David had to steal hii
 sweetheart, and bushwhack her dis
 tempered old father the rest of his
 life. Solomon's jularky made him 6 | roranodo M0rpou and fIolofow. fox