NEWS FROM CAROLINE.
Young and enterprising is the West,
Old and meditative is the East.
Turn, O youth! with intellectual zest
Where the sage invites thee to his feast.
--Milnes.
On the whole, I enjoyed my cigar. The waters of affliction had rolled over me and I basked in the sunshine of peaceful comfort for a full half-hour. Under like conditions, many good fellows of my set would have toyed too freely with the cognac. But I was cautious and conservative as regards the liquor. I glanced at Caroline's face, which wore a humorous smile as it gazed at me from the mirror.
"Spirits," I cried, facetiously, winking at Caroline's reflection, and receiving a winking response, "spirits are to be handled with care, my dear. There's no telling what they may do to us."
At first I derived considerable amusement from the grotesque effects that I could obtain from the juxtaposition of my cigar and Caroline's delicate face. If it was a kind of sacrilege to sit there and watch the smoke issuing from my wife's dainty lips, I comforted my better self with the thought that I was in no way to blame for existing conditions. If the sideboard's mirror at that moment framed a picture that might have been taken from the Police Gazette, was I not powerless to alter the decrees of fate? I had come into my wife's butterfly-beauty without first sloughing off my gross chrysalis-habits.
I playfully shook my fist at the accusatory mirror.
"It's no reflection on me," I murmured, jocosely. A sickly kind of smile flitted across Caroline's face, driving me to a stimulant again. I poured out a pony of brandy.
"To drink or not to drink--that is the question," I soliloquized; observing with satisfaction that Shakespeare tended to remove the expression of untimely hilarity in my wife's countenance. "O Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?"
A joyful gleam came into Caroline's eyes as I thought of Van Tromp. I swallowed the cognac and presently saw a flush creep into my wife's cheeks. The sight angered me.
"If two or three fingers of old brandy show themselves at once in this--ah--borrowed face of mine," I reflected, "I might as well take the pledge at once. Caroline," I continued, addressing my remarks to the mirror, "I am ashamed of you. If you don't quit this kind of thing, you'll lose your complexion--and what'll poor robin do then? I am ashamed of you, Caroline. I really didn't think that you'd go so far."