And Bull Dogge is right.
A time when the penny postman is looked for with more interest than if he bore the glad tidings so anxiously expected, "Sebastopol not taken,"—Laura Matilda in the parlor, to whom he brings but one, looks with envious eyes upon Biddy in the kitchen who gets two.
A time when men who haven't got a wife wish they had, and those who are provided with that article of questionable usefulness wish they had another; when maids wish for one husband, and matrons for half a dozen.
A time when nunneries and monasteries go into disrepute, and the accommodating doctrines of Mahomet, and the get-as-many-wives-as-you-can-support-and-keep-them-as-long-as-they-don't-fight principles of Mormonism, are regnant in the land.
And above all, a time when independent bachelors like the deponent, are beset with so many written laudations of the married state, by unknown females, that every single-blessed man in all the land wishes he could take a short nap and wake up with a good-looking wife and nine large-sized children.
On the morning of this traditional pairing-off day, the postman brought me seventeen letters, all unpaid, and all from "Valentine." Retired to my room—closed the curtains—lit the gas—placed before me a mug of ale and two soda crackers, and proceeded to open and examine the documents.
No. 1 was sealed with beeswax and stamped with a thimble; and from its brown complexion, I should think it had fallen into the dishwater, and been dried with a hot flatiron. I couldn't read it very well—there wasn't any capitals—the g's and y's had tails with as many turns as a corkscrew, the p's bore a strong resemblance to inky hair pins, the h's resembled miniature plum trees; every f looked like a fish-pole, and every z like a frog's foot, and the signature I should judge had been made by the ink bottle, which must have been taken suddenly sea-sick, and have used the paper as a substitute for the wash-bowl.
All I could understand of it was "my penn is poor, my inck is pail, my (something) for yew shal never" do something else, I couldn't make out what.
No. 2 was in a lace envelope—cucumber-colored paper, and was perfumed with something that smelt like bumble-bees; handwriting very delicately illegible, proving that it came from a lady—spelling very bad, showing that it came from a fashionable lady—poetry very unfamiliar, commencing "come rest in this" the next word looked like "boots," but that didn't seem to make sense—concluded it must be "barn-yard" as it went on to say "though the herd have fled from thee, thy home is still here." Couldn't make out whether she was in earnest and wanted me to come and see her, or was only trying to insinuate that I was a stray calf, and had better go home to my bovine parent.
(Bull Dogge says he wonders the ladies take such pains to render their correspondence unreadable—the up-strokes being just visible to the naked eye, and the down-strokes no heavier than a mosquito's leg—and why there is such a universal tendency to make little fat o's and a's just on the line, so that they look like glass beads strung on a horse-hair—and why they will persist in making their chirography generally so uncertain and undecided that a page of ordinary feminine handwriting looks like a sheet of paper covered with a half finished web, made by 'prentice spiders, and condemned as awkwardly clumsy by the journeymen spinners).