"You women!" Why, a man may live with even one woman all his life, and yet really know no more about her, than I do why men were born at all. I heard a husband once deplore that, being ignorant of the French language, he could not know the meaning of a sentence in the book he was reading.
"Give it to me," replied his wife, immediately translating it. "Why," exclaimed he, in astonishment, "I never knew you understood French!" And yet he had lived with her fifteen years. It is just so with other and still more important knowledge of a wife. Now I ask you, Mr. Bonner, when you choose a horse, if you do not first find out what that horse can do, especially how fast he can trot without damage?—which, by the way, is the last question a married man thinks of asking about his wife.
Well, isn't a wife quite as important an animal as a horse? I would like to see Dexter put to dragging stones on the highway, or Pocahontas to rotary sawing of wood at a railway station!
And yet thousands of men all over the country make stupider blunders than these about their wives, every day in the year, partly, as I say, through ignorance, which of course is culpable, and partly through indifference.
Many women, if they were half as judiciously managed, as to their physical needs and possible capabilities, as are horses, would be worth much more to their owners; and I am sure I have seen men to whom this argument would be the only one they would think worth listening to. Also, in all fairness, I should add, that I have seen others who remembered it first and always.
SOME CITY SIGHTS.
More than in any other locality does a funeral passing through Broadway seem impressive to me. There, while life is at the flood, and thousands pass and repass you whose faces you do not recognize, save by the universal stamp of eagerness and bustle and hurry, as if the goal in the distance which they aim at was for eternity and not for fleeting time; there, where bright eyes shine brightest, and silken locks and silken dresses shimmer fairest in the dancing sunbeams; there, where all nations, all interests are represented, and the panorama never halts, day or night, but only substitutes one set of moving figures for another; there, indeed, does Death seem Death when it glides stealthily in among the busy, surging crowd.