MOLLY O’MOLLY.

VI.

I have often thought what splendid members of the diplomatic corps women would make, especially married women.  As much delicate management is required of them, they have as much financiering to do as any minister plenipotentiary of them all.  Let a woman once have an object in view, and ’o’er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense or rare; with head, hands, or feet, she pursues her way, and swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies;’ but she attains her object.

You poor, hood-winked portion of humanity—­man—­you think you know woman; that she ‘can’t pull the wool over your eyes.’  Just take a retrospective view.  Did your wife ever want any thing that she didn’t somehow get it?  Whether a new dress, or the dearest secret of your soul, she either, Delilah-like, wheedled it out of you, or, in a passion, you almost flung it at her, as an enraged monkey flings cocoa-nuts at his tormentor.

And how she has changed your habits, has turned the course of your life, made it flow in the channel she wished, instead of, as heretofore, ‘wandering at its own sweet will,’ as the gently-winding but useless brook has been converted into a mill-race.

There is Mr. Jones.  Before he married, as free and easy a man as ever smoked a meerschaum.  Mrs. Jones is considered a pattern woman; but of that you can judge for yourself.  Her first reformation was in regard to his club, from which he returned home late, redolent of brandy-punch, and lavish of my dears.  All she could say to him had no effect, till, after the birth of little Nellie, she joined a Ladies’ Reading Society, meeting on his club evening; he wouldn’t leave the baby to the care of a servant, consequently staid at home himself.

He was also in the habit of resorting to the gymnasium, ostensibly for exercise, as he was dyspeptic; but his wife suspected it was more to meet his old cronies.  Finding retrenchment necessary, and looking on gymnastics somewhat as a Yankee looks on a fine stream that turns no mill, she dismissed one of the servants, and so arranged it that the surplus strength that formerly so ran to waste should make the fires, rock the cradle, and split certain hickory logs.  Very soon Mr. Jones, who is a lawyer, found his business so much increased that he was obliged to remain in his office all day, except at meal-time; after which, however heartily he might have eaten, he never complained of indigestion.  With this, thrifty Mrs. Jones was delighted, till one day she surprised him in his office, enveloped in tobacco-smoke, with elevated feet, reading a nice new novel; you may be sure that after that, she insisted on the exercise.  As their family increased, thinking still further retrenchment necessary, she gently broached the relinquishing of the meerschaum.  Finding him obstinate in his opposition, she one day accidentally broke it.  It was one that he had been coloring for years; he had devoted time and attention to it, that, if properly directed, might have made him a German philosopher, an antiquary, or a profound theologian; or, if devoted to his law studies, would have fitted him for Chief-Justice of the United States.