Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 June 1885 — Something About Young Wives. [ARTICLE]

Something About Young Wives.

Why do all the watery-eyed, shakykneed young wives appeal to you for sympathy when they have rocked their first seraph to sleep in a cut-teeth Mother Hubbard (only meant for babies,) and why do they all, as a class, wipe the corners of their off eye with a new 10-cent pink-bordered mouchair and plaintively tell-you that “Dick has changed; oh, how horribly changed,” and that he doesn’t love baby one bit—not half so much as his nasty sleuth hounds, pointers and poodles; as for horses, “goodness knows, he prizes them away beyond, she and young Bichard.” Now all this is sadly true and truly sad. One by one they come, too, for a key to the family rebus, after a trip to Europe and a disappearance for a time in Ohio, which is a great State for Presidents. When you shake your head, which knows a vast deal too much, you say you knovf not the reason of this wherefore. You tell a big story and think she will take that round-eyed young Dick to the park, leaving you to answer your last love letter in answer to one in which he promises so many kingly things and a dog cart. But she takes up baby, who is swal- 1 lowing his left leg and mewing like a milk-hungry kitten, and she looks at you so soberly you dare not trifle with her. In turn, you gaze on her,'who was one of the j oiliest, neatest girls you ever saw thirteen months ago. Dick is still jolly to everybody ex-’ cept his wife, of whom he seems in awe because she is the daughter of her mother. He lately walked on tip-toes, and romps only in th? stable-yard with the dogs. The real fact of the matter is that young girls lop down after having caught a man, tired from the effort, and they spend two-thirds of the year with “mor,” who points out the frailties in Dick’s constitution much too often to suit Dick. He loved a jolly, cleanly girl, but he did not bargain for a weary, pale, slip-shod wife, who never crimps her hair for him any more, nor wears pretty house dresses or clean collars unless company comes. He expected that some time he should have to do the right thing by an heir, but again he did not bargain for a damp, sickly, bottle-reared, poor almshouse style of baby, who moans his days away and howls opt the nights. A jolly mother brings up jolly babies —you may be sure of -that—and viceyersa. Dick’s smoking dea is full of slop water and feaby garments in the process ol drying. Smpke hurts, Alice and young Dick, so her mother says. His old bright-eyed, red-cheeked girl has grown into a down-at-the-heel, quiet, non-reading, non-talking woman, full of complaints and neuralgia, with only a thin crust over her tears, and to cap all she is jealous because he can still laugh and admire a pretty woman neatly dressed. If young a wives only . knew it the only way to keep a husband is to practice all the arts they used so cleverly to win him. No woman expects to change so, but they make the grave mistake of fancying that maternity will also rouse some hidden patern-

ity, and that the father will grow solemn and teary with the mother. Not a bit of it. The baby adds anbther chap to romp with, and if he isn’t that kind of a little animal he is voted, “N. G.” until he is old enough to know a dada and to know a papier-maohe pistol from a doll. All the tiinb this youngster is looked upon as an interloper if his pretty mother gets slouchy and wears old flannel, musty, condensed-food-smelling wrappers. Be bright, talk to him of the dav’s news, save some pin money and get a tru.sty woman who will look after the baby when you go out with Dick, but for your child’s sake don’t trust him always? to that social fraud and horror, a baby nurs.e— St. Louis Republican.

One of the Hudson, Bay Company’s officers has with him a young wife and a child, a tiny girl, 3 years old—a pretty, prattling, fearless, fascinating young woman. She is everybody's pet, from the rather dandy wheelman who tries to entice her up to his pilot-box, which towers above the vessel, down to the grizzled, grimy deck-hands, whose acquaintance she has somehow or other made on the lower deck. On the floor of this lower deck, whither she has been taken by her nurse, she has seen three men lying bound, chained hand and foot. They are on their way to be tried at Fargo, and the Sheriff who has effected their capjture, never leaves them, for they are known to be desperate. The little child came to them and looked at them curiously; they looked silently at her. They probably never had seen anything so dainty or so sweet before. She saw nothing in them to frighten her. So she advanced and spoke to them in her own broken words, she even touched the fetters on the hands of one of them, and smi!ed in his face, and asked him what they Were. The man smiled too, without replying, and the child moved away. As she walked there was a sudden quick jerk of the whole ship, its further side ground jarringly against some unyielding substance hidden in the water; it tilted over slightly, the child lost her balance, and, with a scream, fell over the side into the water. The vessel for an instant was stationary. The three prisoners saw her disappear. The prisoner to whom she had spoken, and whose handcuffs she had for a moment touched, exclaimed: “God! don’t ye shoot, Bill!” Then quickly rolling himself over and over, he dropped into the water beside the child. As his hands were bound behind him, he caught the child’s dress in his teeth, and treading the water with his fettered feet, kept the child above water until help came. As everybody’s attention was diverted to the opposite side of the steamer, it was some time before the boat from the vessel reached them. But the child was saved. Needless to relate the thankfulness of the poor young mother or the' gratitude of the father. “I guess you air a white man, Rik, after all,” said the Sheriff. A purse was made up among the passengers for the man, whose name was Erikir, a Scandinavian by birth. It was afterward learned that the Sheriff told the story to the “Jedge,” and the Judge, with Western freedom, and that admiration for a gallant act which covers a multitude of sins, so arranged that-when it was found that Erikir had mysteriously disappeared, nothing was done beyond a little official bluster,and he escaped.— R. Machray, in Harper.