Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!)
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An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:
I was on the threshold, so to speak, of thirty when my Uncle Ezra gave his first evidence of being aware of my existence by leaving me a competency. He had never seen me, nor I him, and he mis-spelled my very name several times in the course of his will; but, nevertheless, he contrived, in this manner, to awaken in me what I may call a posthumous affection for him, which I have carefully cherished ever since. The justice of this sentiment will be clear when I say that by this fortuitous turn of his pen the estimable old gentleman had made practicable the most ardent desire of my heart.
I was utterly and consumedly weary of being a single man. I aspired to enter a more admired and more admirable estate; to have done with landladies and table d’hote dinners; to be sure, under all conditions, of finding a button where a button ought to be; to know the unspeakable wealth of comfort and seclusion which is miraculously packed into the limited compass of that little word “Home!” In short, I yearned to become a bachelor, and this was precisely what the benignant performance of my Uncle Ezra enabled me to do.
Perhaps it is necessary to explain that one cannot be a thoroughly authentic bachelor under five thousand a year. Short of that income, one may, of course, remain unmarried; but to remain unmarried means nothing more than to be a single man — a creature, that is, commonly supposed to be conditioned not so much by his inclinations as by material circumstance. Who, pray, is going to believe that he is single because he chooses to be, instead of because he must? He may have all the courage of his conviction, but he can never hope to impress others with the conviction of his courage. Possessing the keenest distaste for a life in the stocks or under the bonds of matrimony, he is yet as helpless to prove this aversion as would be a fresh egg to substantiate its very possible disinclination for becoming a chick.
“A single man, indeed!” says the world. “And why not, so long as his salary, as every one knows, is but thirty-five dollars a week? Humph! Just give him the means to marry upon, and let us see how soon our misogamist will change his mind!”
That is it. Give the egg an incubator, and see how long we shall have to wait before it turns into a chick, and begins to peep, and peck, and preen, in a manner identical with that of all chicks that have gone before! They have no one to believe in their claim to originality, the unhatched egg and the unmarried man! The world has the unique distinction of being too much with them and too much against them at one and the same time.
But the single man of means — whom I have chosen to distinguish as the bachelor proper — that is a very different story! Even the most skeptical must allow that he is the product of his inclinations, not of his restrictions. He is magnificent in his isolation, in his independence of that preposterous, corpulent little boy, with the wings and the bow and arrows, who sets half of the trouble in the world afoot. He knows what is best for him— yes, indeed! And, if he ever feels that it is necessary to his peace of mind to cumber himself with something which is, at once, exorbitantly costly and readily deranged, then I warrant you he will have the good sense to see that what he wants is an automobile, and not a wife. An automobile keeps up a continual clamour whenever you take it out: an automobile gets into the habit of blowing you up at regular intervals, and of running down your neighbours whenever opportunity offers: an automobile is forever in need of new and expensive trimmings and fittings — but then, you can always exchange an automobile for something useful. I can say all the rest of a wife — but I can’t say that!
