She then took her departure with a rising inflection. On the following day, however, I found her at the office door, and she stood near and consulted me again, while I took up the ashes and started a fire in the stove.
Her case is quite peculiar.
She wants a divorce from her husband on the grounds of cruelty to animals, or something of that kind, and when she first told me about it I thought she had a case, but when we came to trial I found that she had had every reason to believe that if she could be segregated from Mr. Merkins she could at once become the bride of a gentleman who ploughed the raging main.
Just as we went to the jury to-day with the case, she heard casually that the gentleman who had been in the main-ploughing business had just married without her knowledge or consent.
“Heap Brain.”
Much trouble has been done by a long haired phrenologist in the West who has, during his life, felt of over a hundred thousand heads. A comparison of a large number of charts given in these cases shows that so far no head examined would indicate anything less than a member of the lower house of congress. Artists, orators, prima-donnas and statesmen are plenty, but there are no charts showing the natural-born farmer, carpenter, shoemaker or chambermaid.
That is the reason butter is so high west of the Missouri river to-day, while genius actually runs riot.
What this day and age of the world needs, is a phrenologist who will paw around among the intellectual domes of free-born American citizens, and search out a few men who can milk a cow in a cool and unimpassioned tone of voice.