"THE LAYING-IN OF JAPANESE FANS."
"Now, ladies, is your time! All the pretty women have gone to New York; every month a certain number of men in this vast Metropolis suddenly decide to marry; for the last five months the deciders have lacked the item indispensable to the carrying out of their object—a woman to marry. The domestic arrangement which they calculated upon, and had prepared for, in many cases even to the laying-in of Japanese fans, scent-cases, hanging wardrobes, and other articles of furniture, has been hopelessly postponed.
"The aggregate of outstanding matrimonial decisions has, owing to the absence of a helpmate to join the board after allotment, become enormous.
"WRETCHED MEN."
"Ladies, those men must marry someone, or the scent-cases and wardrobes will lose their freshness: and they must marry US, or none. It may surprise you when I say that they will prefer even you to none: but you will find it is so!
"Ladies!" she continued, "we have triumphed! Do you hear the murmur without—the murmur of multitudes like the ocean? It is the men! They know that eleven eligible spinsters—not to speak of our excellent factotum, Miss McSwinger—are assembled in this room. Look!"
In two strides she had reached the window-curtains. She threw them back. Without, the whole square and adjacent streets were packed with a surging mass of stove-pipe hats.
As the curtains separated there arose a vast and deafening shout, while ten thousand hands simultaneously held aloft ten thousand wedding rings.
