I sometimes think that if mothers knew to what sorrow and gross and shameless treatment their sons were to submit all through their lives, they would put them out of their misery with a base-ball club. Some mothers do try this but they postpone it too long and the sons get too large and more difficult to kill than when their skulls are young and tender.
I have alwavs maintained that a kind word and a caress will do more for the great yearning nature of the husband than harshness and severity. The tuue wife may reprove her husband when he spills coal all over the Brussels carpet and then steps on it and grinds it in, but how much better even that is than to kick him under the bed and then sit down on him and gouge out his eyes with a pinking iron.
I know that men are too often misunderstood. They may be rough on the exterior but they can love Oh, so earnestly, so warmly, so truly, so deeply, so intensely, so yearningly, so fondly and so universally!
Always kiss your husband good-bye when you go down town to your work. It may be the last time. I once knew a wife who went down town to price a new dolman, and because she was vexed about something she did not kiss her husband but slammed the door and left him. When she returned he was a corpse!
While peeling the potatoes for dinner with the carving knife, he had stepped on a clothes pin, which threw him forward over the baby carriage, the knife entering at the northeast corner of the gizzard and sticking out beneath the shoulder blade about two feet into space. What a scene for the now repentant wife. There, in the full vigor of his manhood, lay all that was mortal of her companion—dead as a mackerel!!!
Let us take this home to ourselves, and ask ourselves today if we are doing the square thing by the only husband we have. Are we loving him as we should, or are we turning this task over to the hired girl?
Intemperance, too, is a fruitful cause of connubial unhappiness. Young man, beware of a wife who loves the flowing bowl. I once knew a beautiful young lady, talented and with good business ability. The entire circle of her acquaintance admired and respected her, but alas! one evening at a banquet her companion, with a heavenly smile, asked her to drink wine. Gradually the taste grew upon her, and although she married, she could not support her husband, and he gradually pined away and died brokenhearted. He used to sit up nights for her to come home, and he caught the inflammatory rheumatism and swelled up and died. It was a terrible thing. I tell you we cannot be too careful. You take a handsome young man like the author of these lines and his power for good or evil is untold. I sometimes wish that I had not been constructed with so much dazzling beauty to the square inch, and I am almost tempted to go and disfigure myself some way. If I were to ask a fair gazelle on New Year's day to come and join me in a social glass and then throw one of those melting 2 by 8 glances of mine on her, I know for a moral certainty that before night she would be in the calaboose. But I shall guard against that. Nothing of that kind shall ever be laid at my door. I promised my aged parents when I left the old homestead that I would never set 'em up for anyone.