Three Ways of Managing A Wife - Page 2

the strength of the patient.

"Husband," Mrs. Wilson ventured at last to say, "the poor child is getting worse every day; and if he lives through it, will, I fear, lose his limb; will you not try what Dr. S. can do with the cold-water treatment?"

"If I could be astonished at any degree of folly on the part of a woman," was his reply, "I should be surprised at such a question. I am doing what I think best for the boy, and you are well aware that my mind was long since made up about the different systems of medicine. Do you confine yourself to nursing the child, and leave his treatment to me."

Ah, this domestic "making up one's mind!" It is a process easily and often rapidly gone through, but its consequences are sometimes so far-reaching and abiding, that we may well tremble as we hear the words carelessly pronounced.

After a period of intense suffering, James Wilson rose from his sick-bed, but he had lost for ever the use of the injured limb; and his mother could not but feel that it was in consequence of the ignorant and barbarous treatment he had received. But remonstrance was vain; the law of the Medes and Persians was not more unalterable than that which regulated the household of Mr. Wilson, not only in matters of consequence, but in the smallest details of domestic economy.

A new cooking apparatus had long been needed in the kitchen of Mr. Wilson, and as this was a matter clearly within her province, his wife hoped she might be able to procure a range which had often been declared indispensable by her domestics. But in this, she was doomed to be disappointed. Her husband remembered the cooking-stove which had been the admiration of his childhood, and resolved, if a change must be made, to have one of that identical pattern in his own house.

"But your mother's stove, though a good one for those days," said Mrs. Wilson, "was one of the first invented, and destitute of most of the conveniences which now accompany them. It consumed, beside, double the amount of fuel required in one of the modern stoves."

"What an absurd idea! A stove is a stove. I take it, and what was good enough for my mother is good enough for my wife. That which answered all the purposes of cooking in so large a family as my father's, might suffice, I should imagine, in our small one. At any rate, I choose to get this pattern, and therefore no more be said on the subject."

It was nothing to Mr. Wilson, that the expenditure of fuel, and time, and labour was so greatly increased by his arrangement--it was nothing that his wife was constantly annoyed by complaints, threats, and changes in her kitchen, or that several mortifying failures in her cuisine had resulted from the obstinate refusal of the oven to bake--what was all this to the luxury of having his own way in his own house?

But the pleasures