And yet, at that very moment, an "owdacious" bite has sent you, with a smothered exclamation, into the middle of the floor, bewailing the day you were born.
Next day you get a "musquito net." What a fool not to think of it before. You festoon it round your bed. It looks pink-y and safe. You explore it carefully that night before getting in, that no treacherous crevice be left for the enemy. You put out the light, and oh! happiness unutterable, listen to their howl of rage outside, which sounds like the "music of the spheres," and fall asleep. Next morning you wake with a splitting headache. Can it be the confined air of the net? Horrible! You spend that day nursing your head and your wrath. Why were musquitoes made? You find no satisfactory solution. What do they live on when not devouring human beings? Why, in the same bed, is one bitten and the other left? Why infest New York, and leave Brooklyn, whose inhabitants deserve punishment for monopolizing Beecher? Why, if they must bite, not pitch in at once, instead of stopping to harrow you by giving a concert.
That night you refuse to gasp under a net, for all the musquitoes that ever swarmed. You even light your gas defiantly, open the windows, and sneer at the black demons as they buzz in for their nocturnal raid. You sit and read—occasionally boxing your own ears—till the small hours, and then—to bed; only to dash frantically against the wall, throw your pillows at the enemy, laugh hysterically, and rise at daylight a blear-eyed, spotted, dismal wretch!
WOMEN'S NEED OF RECREATION.
I read an article the other day on working-men's clubs, which set me thinking. In it was set forth the necessity, after a man's hard day's work, of an evening of rest, away from home, where he should find light and warmth, and boon companionship, other than is to be found in the corner grocery.
Now this is well, were there not a better way, as I believe. I am not about to propose clubs for working-women, because our police reports show every day that they have existed for a long time—thanks to "corner groceries"—and that they are made of any implement that comes handy, and result in bruised flesh and a broken head. This being the case, I cannot see why the working-woman, as well as the working-man, does not need, after a hard day's work, "light, warmth, and boon companionship of an evening, away from home." Nay, all the more, since work, hard as her husband may, it is often in the fresh, open air; or, if not, he has it going and returning, and the boon companionship of his fellow-workmen with it; while she, with "Ginx's last baby" to look after, in some noisome tenement house, stands over the perpetual wash-tub or cooking-stove, with two or three half-grown children hanging to her draggled skirts, never exchanging her unwomanly rags, not even perhaps to mass for a hurried prayer in the church which, God be thanked, is free alike to poor and rich, and which suggests, in its own way, a distant heaven for her.
Thinking over all this, I said why not Germanize this thing? Why not have clubs for working-men and their families, with innocent amusement minus the drink? Isn't it possible? Or if not, I wish it were, for the poor harassed women's sake. I only see the millennial germ of it; but this I know, that the wives need it more, far more, than their husbands, the wide world over, and in every strata of society; by the pains of motherhood, even in favorable conditions; by her intenser nervous organization; by her indoor confinement and narrowing, petty detail-worries; by the work that ends not at sundown as does his. By the wakeful, unrestful nights, which every mother knows; this is the hardest, most wearing kind of work, no matter what may be said of the husband, who has his sleep at least; who demands that in every family exigency as his right, and as the foundation of his ability to labor for his family. Ah! what if the wife and mother, with less strength, feebler organization, should make a stand for this? even when, in addition to her other cares, she helps in some outside honest way to support the family?