"I am."
"And you wouldn"t let a man beat you--not even if he was your husband--would you?"
"Indeed I wouldn"t," the missionary said.
The mandarin"s eight wives looked at one another, nodding their heads.
Then the oldest said softly:
"Now I understand why the foreign devil never has more than one wife.
He is afraid!"--_Western Christian Advocate_.
PAT--"I hear your woife is sick, Moike."
MIKE--"She is thot."
PAT--"Is it dangerous she is?"
MIKE--"Divil a bit. She"s too weak to be dangerous any more!"
SON--"Say, mama, father broke this vase before he went out."
MOTHER--"My beautiful majolica vase! Wait till he comes back, that"s all."
SON--"May I stay up till he does?"
"Because a fellow has six talking machines," said the boarder who wants to be an end man, "it doesn"t follow that he is a Mormon."
It was a wizened little man who appeared before the judge and charged his wife with cruel and abusive treatment. His better half was a big, square-jawed woman with a determined eye.
"In the first place, where did you meet this woman who, according to your story, has treated you so dreadfully?" asked the judge.
"Well," replied the little man, making a brave attempt to glare defiantly at his wife, "I never did meet her. She just kind of overtook me."
"Harry, love," exclaimed Mrs. Knowall to her husband, on his return one evening from the office, "I have b-been d-dreadfully insulted!"
"Insulted?" exclaimed Harry, love. "By whom?"
"B-by your m-mother," answered the young wife, bursting into tears.
"My mother, Flora? Nonsense! She"s miles away!"
Flora dried her tears.
"I"ll tell you all about it, Harry, love," she said. "A letter came to you this morning, addressed in your mother"s writing, so, of course, I--I opened it."
"Of course," repeated Harry, love, dryly.
"It--it was written to you all the way through. Do you understand?"
"I understand. But where does the insult to you come in?"
"It--it came in the p-p-postscript," cried the wife, bursting into fresh floods of briny. "It s-said: "P-P-P. S.--D-dear Flora, d-don"t f-fail to give this l-letter to Harry. I w-want him to have it.""
"By jove, I left my purse under the pillow!"
"Oh, well, your servant is honest, isn"t she?"
"That"s just it. She"ll take it to my wife."
There swims no goose so gray, but soon or late She finds some honest gander for her mate.
--_Pope_.
A clerk showed forty patterns of ginghams to a man whose wife had sent him to buy some for her for Christmas, and at every pattern the man said: "My wife said she didn"t want anything like that."
The clerk put the last piece back on the shelf. "Sir," he said, "you don"t want gingham. What you want is a divorce."
Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.--_Shakespeare_.
In the election of a wife, as in A project of war, to err but once is To be undone forever.
--_Thomas Middleton_.
Of earthly goods, the best is a good wife; A bad, the bitterest curse of human life.
--_Simonides_.
_See also_ Domestic finance; Suffragettes; Talkers; Temper; Woman suffrage.
WOMAN
Woman--the only s.e.x which attaches more importance to what"s on its head than to what"s in it.