Gallipolis Journal

The Old Bachelor.
BY JOSH BILLINGS.
A chronic old bachelor is invariably of the neuter gender, I don't care how much he may offer to bet that it ain't so.
They are like dried apples on a string - want a good soaking before they will do to use.
I suppose there is some of them who have a good excuse for their neuterness; many of them are too stingy to marry. This is one of the best excuses I know of, for a stingy man ain't fit to have a nice woman.
Some old bachelors get after a flirt, and can't travel so fast as she does, and then concludes all the female group are hard to ketch, and good for nothing when they are ketched.
A flirt is a rough thing to overhaul unless the right dog gets after her, and then they are the easiest of all to ketch, and often make very best of wives.
When a flirt really falls in love, she is as powerless as a mown daisy.
Her impudence then changes into modesty, her cunning into fear, her spurs into a halter, her pruning hook into a cradle.
The best way to ketch a flirt is to travel the other way from which they are going or sit down on the ground and whistle some lively tune till the flirt comes round.
Old bachelors make the flirts, and then the flirts get more than even by making the old bachelors.
A majority of the flirts get married finally, for they have a great quantity of the most dainty titbits of woman's natur. and always have shrewdness to back up their sweetness.
Flirts don't deal in poetry and water gruel; they have got to have brains, or else somebody would trade them out of their capital at the first swap.
Disappointed love must of course be all on one side, and this ain't any more excuse for being an old bachelor than it is for a man to quit all kinds of manual labor, just out of spite, and join a poorhouse because he can't lift a ton at one pop.
An old bachelor will brag about his freedom to you, his relief from anxiety, his independence. This is a dead beat past resurrection, for everybody knows there ain't a more anxious dupe than he is. All his dreams are charcoal sketches of boarding-school misses; he dresses, greases his hair, paints his grizzly mustache, cultivates bunions and corns, to please his captains, the women, and only gets laughed at for his pains.
I tried being an old bachelor till I was about twenty years old. and came very near dying a dozen times. I had more sharp pain in one year than I have had since, put it all in a heap. I was in a lively fever all the time.
There is only one person who has inhabited this world thus far that I think could have been an old bachelor and done the subject justice, and he was Adam; but I hold it is every man's duty to select a partner and keep the dance hot.