Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1886 — Novelist Howells and His Dainty Wife. [ARTICLE]

Novelist Howells and His Dainty Wife.

Howells is a dumpy little man, with a fat nut-brown face, full jaws, handsome chin, eyes that ooze a warm, bright light from their hanging lids, and wear.ng his hair parted in the middle and banged squarely and most delightfully over h s brow. That bang is a touch of nature that makes all women’s hearts kind to him. He is undersized, walks with a little lumpitylump gait most fetching, and has boyish manners hard to harmonize with those stories of his Boston exclusiveness. Mrs. Howells, his dainty little wife, looks line a precious bit of old china, like a fragile, creamy-tinted cup, sprigged all over with blue forget menots, “seen,” Charles Lamb would say, “through the lucid atmosphere of far Cathay.” —Washington letter to the Savannah News.

They begged him to play a little. He seemed to feel bashful at first, but after a while began to play vigorously. “What power!” saida listener to the owner of the piano. “Yes!” exclaimed the latter in alarm, “he seems to have considerable muscle; but he ought to know that this isn't a gymnasium.”

Life is like a pack of cards. Childhood’s best cards aro hearts; youth is captured by diamonds; middle age is conquered with a club, while old age is raked in by the insatiable spade.