our career. ON KOPPERBLAKKEN, the eminent Dutch philosopher, cherished the belief that we were all half cheeses, and that we rolled down the hill of life until decay stopped He thus accounted for all the happiness and misery in life. If a marriage was happy, he concluded that the original cheese had rolled together; if, on the contrary, unhappiness characterized the union, he detected a dissimilarity of B cheese. All spinsters and bachelors he declared, had either neglected to cultivate, or had not yet discovered, their half cheese; and he was employed writing an elaborate treatise explanatory of the reason a wife was termed, "the better-half," when decay overtook him, and, according to his own theory, the cheese of Von Kopperblakken crumbled away. Whether the eminent Dutchman was correct in his theory, is a question which will not be discussed in these pages, though it is one of the only modes of explaining how people meet, and agreeing to differ upon all points in mind and habit, yet jog on through life most comfortably together. Thus it was with two unmarried and unmarrying men-Robert Markham, and Samson Merridew, who resided in the same house, in a small town in the pleasant county of Hertfordshire. No two men were so unlike each other, and no two men liked the society of each other so well. Robert Markham was very reserved, very brusque, but very business-like, and twenty years older than his friend. Report said that he had been a merchant, and was enormously |