No face, however fair,--not even the blooming one of their favourite granddaughter, seems so lovely to the uxorious old husband as the one he remembers to have been so proud of forty years ago, and which still beams on him with an expression of tenderness that reminds him of its former beauty.

And she, too, with what complacency does she listen to his oft-repealed reminiscences of her youthful attractions, and how dear is the bond that still unites them! Plain and uninteresting in the eyes of others, they present only the aspect of age; alas! never lovely: but in them at least other gleams of past good looks recall the past, when each considered the other peerless, though now they alone remember that "such things were, and were most sweet." Their youth and their maturity have been passed together; their joys and their sorrows have been shared, and they are advancing hand in hand towards that rapid descent in the mountain of life, at whose base is the grave, hoping that in death they may not be divided.
Who can look at those old couples, and not feel impressed with the sanctity and blessedness of marriage, which, binding two destinies in one, giving the same interests and the same objects of affection to both, secures for each a companionship and a consolation for those days which must come to all, when, fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, the society of the young and gay can no longer charm them, and the present requires the recollections of the past to render it less cheerless; recollections only to be found in those who have grown old together?
Yonder old man, leaning on the arm of a middle-aged woman, who seems less like his housekeeper than his domestic tyrant, offers an example of the fate of those who have lived in what is commonly called a state of single blessedness.

A youth and maturity of pleasure have been followed by an old age of infirmity.
He had a thousand pleasantries ready to utter on the subject of marriage whenever it was mentioned; could cite endless examples of unhappy couples (forgetting to name a single one of the happy); and laughed and shook his head as he declared that _he_ never would be caught.
As long as health remained, and that he could pass his evenings in gay society, or at the theatres, he felt not the want of that greatest of all comforts, _home_; a comfort inseparable from a wife to share, as well as to make it.

But the first attack of illness that confined him to his room, with no tender hand to smooth his pillow, no gentle voice to inquire into his wants, or to minister to them; no one to anticipate his wishes almost before he had framed them; no loving face to look fondly and anxiously on him; made him feel sensible, that though a bachelor's life of pleasure may pass agreeably enough during the season of health, it is a most cheerless and dreary state of existence when deprived of it.
The discovery is, alas! made too late.

All that he had ever heard or urged against matrimony applies tenfold to cases where it is contracted in old age.