BACHELORS ON BACHELORHOOD.

Auckland Star, Volume XXX, Issue 160, 8 July 1899, Page 5 (Supplement)

BACHELORS ON BACHELORHOOD.

SOME REASONS WHY THEY DO NOT

MARRY

A journalist, who has been making a 'study of bachelorhood In all its phases.lately took it into his head to beard the bachelor in his den, and demand the reason for his singleness. He had often been Impressed ,he says, by the faces of the unmarried men he met in the clubs. Upon those faces were depicted indifference, jollity, the devil-may-care look, resignation, weariness, pain; but in vain did he search, for he has not found contentment mirrored there. Then he bethought himself of the interview. He boldly called on several well-known men, each one high in his own calling, and here are some of the reasons they gave for remaining single he retails in the "Scotsman":— AN ACTOR WHO WOULD, YET WOULD NOT. What is worth while in bachelorhood? Lots of things, a tragedian replies. , What is wanting? The main thing. 'Tls an old cant phrase that a bachelor has his freedom; and so he has. He has heaps of it—so much, in fact, that It becomes irksome, and nearly every bachelor has, at some time of his existence, tied his freedom up in a neat little package about the size of a ring box and put it in the hands of some woman, who either threw It back upon his weary shoulders or destroyed It for ever. It is convenient to be returned in a cab by some conscientious friend at the door of one's bachelor apartments at 3 a.m. and "no questions asked." One may put one's shoes on the hat rack, carefully deposit one's cigarette case under the bed, and sleep in the bath tub; and one's own weary head will offer the only reproach in the morning. But then the bachelor's Is a very lonely life. I imagine it to be rather a jolly thing to come home and find the little slippers by the big ones on the fender. To find a heart big with sympathy, and, above all, to find the buttons on everything. And yet, could one see the boys go off for a good old time without a murmur of — "I cannot but remember such things were, And were most dear to me." > A DOCTOR "WON'T TELL." A doctor, whether he is the happy possessor of a wife or not, Is essentially a married man. The very choice of his profession implies the fatherly supervision of a family. The little ailments of the children, the throat troubles of the young lady who "sings a little," the real and imaginary ills of the maiden aunt and grandmother are all in line with the anxieties of the father of a family.

To be sure, in the few hours given to the physician for recreation he is apt to be joyful over the fact that there are no ties to bind those particular moments. The bachelor can throw back his head and walk faster as he takes his exercise, and he is more apt to have exhilarating objective points. But ou this topic, as on all others, the physician, through force of habit, is reticent. The doctor, like the lawyer, is constantly under a solemn pledge "not to tell," and so It becomes second nature to avoid direct answers. BACHELORHOOD A MERE HABIT. A man who is a novelist, poet, and editor all in one says:—Bachelorhood is a groove, a rut in the road of life. We stay in it because we are in it, some of us culpably negligent for not getting out, and others are kept in by the force of circumstances. Bachelorhood is a habit, like smoking. Sixteen hours out of the twenty-four we soothe our senses with nicotine until we imagine it a necessity. Soothe our senses With a magnetic personality, and we cease to be bachelors. A POET ON THE JOYS OF BACHELORHOOD. Ah, yes (replied a poet), it will be only too easy to point out how it is that our bachelorhood calls out all that is best and noble in man. The same mysterious power that puts the fuller crimson on the robin's breast and livelier iris on the dove causes the yet unmated animal of the genus homo to show himself in his most seductive guise and to undertake those things in art and war, and gold-making and name-making, which shall some day belong to the one and only golden girl, the not impossible She, the Woman Who will Know and "Will some Day understand.

Yes, brother bachelor, tell her all these things if you have to, but by the three-fold mystic sign of the open door and the unfettered foot, tell her nothing of that ineffable and Intangible joy of careless bachelorhood which Is my secre.t and yours. Even though you did tell her, she would not believe you. She would certainly not understand, and It is two to one that she would march away saying that bacheloritis is an affliction that should come along with the whooping-cough and the measles, and is as pathetic in an old man of fifty as mumps in an octogenarian. .