"St. Clair Higgins," Los Angeles.—"My life is a failure; I have adored, wildly, madly and she whom I love has turned coldly from me and shed her affections upon another. What would you advise me to do?"
You should set your affections on another also—or on several, if there are enough to go round. Also, do everything you can to make your former flame unhappy. There is an absurd idea disseminated in novels, that the happier a girl is with another man, the happier it makes the old lover she has blighted. Don't allow yourself to believe any such nonsense as that. The more cause that girl finds to regret that she did not marry you, the more comfortable you will feel over it. It isn't poetical, but it is mighty sound doctrine.
"Arithmeticus." Virginia, Nevada.—"If it would take a cannon ball 3 1-3 seconds to travel four miles, and 33-8 seconds to travel the next four, and 3 5-8 to travel the next four, and if its rate of progress continued to diminish in the same ratio, how long would it take it to go fifteen hundred millions of miles?
I don't know.
"Ambitious Learner," Oakland.—Yes; you are right—America was not discovered by Alexander Selkirk.
"Discarded Lover."—"I loved, and still love, the beautiful Edwitha Howard, and intended to marry her. Yet, during my temporary absence at Benicia, last week, alas! she married Jones. Is my happiness to be thus blasted for life? Have I no redress?"
Of course you have. All the law, written and unwritten, is on your side. The intention and not the act constitutes crime—in other words, constitutes the deed. If you call your bosom friend a fool, and intend it for an insult, it is an insult; but if you do it playfully, and
