‘You must remember, Candace,’ said a good deacon to her one day, when she was ordering him about at a catechizing, ‘you ought to give honour to your husband; the wife is the weaker vessel.’
‘I de weaker vessel?’ said Candace, looking down from the tower of her ample corpulence on the small, quiet man whom she had been fledging with the ample folds of a worsted comforter, out of which his little head and shining bead-eyes looked much like a blackbird in a nest,—‘I de weaker vessel? Umph!’
A whole-woman’s-rights’ convention could not have expressed more in a day than was given in that single look and word. Candace considered a husband as a thing to be taken care of,—a rather inconsequent and somewhat troublesome species of pet, to be humoured, nursed, fed, clothed, and guided in the way that he was to go,—an animal that was always losing of buttons, catching colds, wearing his best coat every day, and getting on his Sunday hat in a surreptitious manner for week-day occasions; but she often condescended to express it as her opinion that he was a blessing, and that she didn’t know what she should do if it wasn’t for Cato. In fact, he seemed to supply her that which we are told is the great want in woman’s situation,—an object in life. She sometimes was heard expressing herself very energetically in disapprobation of the conduct of one of her sable friends, named Jinny Stiles, who, after being presented with her own freedom, worked several years to buy that of her husband, but became afterwards so disgusted with her acquisition that she declared she would, ‘neber buy anoder nigger.’
‘Now Jinny don’t know what she’s talkin’ about,’ she would say. ‘S’pose he does cough and keep her awake nights, and take a little too much sometimes, a’n’t he better’n no husband at all? A body wouldn’t seem to hab nuffin to lib for, ef dey hadn’t an ole man to look arter. Men is nate’lly foolish about some tings,—but dey’s good deal better’n nuffin.’
And Candace, after this condescending remark, would lift off with one hand a brass kettle in which poor Cato might have been drowned, and fly across the kitchen with it as if it were a feather.
CHAPTER XII.
MISS PRISSY.
Will our little Mary really fall in love with the Doctor?—The question reaches us in anxious tones from all the circle of our readers; and what especially shocks us is, that grave doctors of divinity, and serious, stocking-knitting matrons, seem to be the class who are particularly set against the success of our excellent orthodox hero, and bent on reminding us of the claims of that unregenerate James, whom we have sent to sea on purpose that our heroine may recover herself of that foolish partiality for him which all the Christian world seems bent on perpetuating.
‘Now, really,’ says the Rev. Mrs. Q., looking up from her bundle of Sewing-Society work, ‘you are not going to let Mary marry the Doctor?’