Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1875 — Wifely Devotion. [ARTICLE]

Wifely Devotion.

A. week or two ago Lady Franklin (bemg, as it, was supposed, nigli unto death) sent to the women of this country the peculiarly womanish and pathetic 'message that they should pray for her. There is as least a chance that the bones of her husband may in a year or two be brought back to England, and the faithful soul, it seems, would hold death off yet a little while that she may rec eive them. Every woman of course was touched by this request; the coarsest journals in copying it commented on it with grave respect. The white-haired old w oman, who in the eyes of the whole world still shows her faithful devotion to the husband who left her in the flush of her youth and beauty to return no more to * her, has been, for this generation, one of the most pathetic figures in modern history. The facts of her story have been exceptionally picturesque and dramatic. There was the brave explorer gone down into eternal cold and silence—into the chambers where the snow and ice are botn, that uninhabited country of awful night, and more awful splendors of light, whose mysteries are but littld less terrible to the living world than those of Hades; and there was the poor wife, powerful only in her devotion, going from one country to another asking help to find and bring him back from death. When the appeal of the woman was answered, and twenty expeditions one after another at a cost c« over *6,000,000 were sent out by shrewd, practical Governments upon this Quixotic errand, the heart of the world was- touched. Nothing in the old crusades was more chivalric than this response to a wife's appeal; these money-making, mercenary days need more than the old poet a great thought now and then to refresh them, . and, as we told ourselves, %e had it here. This w oman’s conjugal love was of the grand old heroic model; it took us back to the days ot Lucretia. We even felt a little surprise that the story should have missed its way and happened in our own age, among U-paniered and fashionable women, and petty, interminable scandal gossip, and suits m divorce courts. But, after all, is it not worth our while to consider whether the eternal ice and snow and the great national expeditions rmay not have served as a pedestal to lilt .this especial woman’s loyalty into notice; and whether, under the befouled and fashionable and commonplace lives of the women who live next door or jostle us in the home-cars,there may not be found love and faith of just as large and pure proportions? Love and marriage { are the rule among us, and love and marriage are now in spite of appearances, matters of gusn and foul jealousy and fouler passion, to be pawed and gloated over by the public. The majority of American wives have no opportunity to prove the depth of their loyalty; in countless lives it never finds louder expression than dally service, cooking, sewing, the rearing of children, trivial helps, modesties, forbearances, tendernesses offered hourly for a life long, bat to wluch no thought or notice is given by her who gives pr him who takes. There are ol course, you tell yourself, unfortunate exceptions to this calm, uujostled state ot married life. There is, for instance, Waugh’s wife, whose pew is next yours in church. (Waugh is never .in it; he takes Sunday to bring up his

foreign correspondence.) You knew him when he was a light-hearted young fellow on the farm near Oldtown, caring for nothing but ” Annie and the boy,” and how to make life wholesOmcr ami cheerfuller for them. lie is * gaunt,, spectacled old man now, hair and eyes and skin of a like washed-out, bloodless color; Waugh A Son an* among the solidest importers on White street. The old man is down at the office hours before his clerks, and at night lie receives men on business. A generation ago his wife fell out of her place to him ami became a piece of furniture in Ids house. He does not know what to do With his money, it gathers and heaps itself about him so fast; his thoughts and affections and soul went down into it long ago. Nobody but his wife could hope to find in this mummy the hearty, affectionate lad whom she loved and married. But she does hope it. It is that old “Charley” whom she clings to and watches for, ami who. she believes, will come back to her at last from this chase of greed in w hich he has lost health and youth and character —everything but one woman’s love. There is, too, that pretty, faded little Mrs. Hicks, who sits opjiosite to yon at the boarding-house table, ami has no eyes nor thought for anything but that very pugnosed, disagreeable school-hoy at, her side. Young Ned is the image of his lather, and that is why she worships him. Everybody knows* where old Ned is, and she knows it. though she tells us every day that lie “is in Europe for the firm.’' She used to creep down the street at niglit last winter and stand opposite a certain house on Thirty-fourth street to see him come out with a woman (lovelier than she was in her freshest prime), and drive off with her to opera and ball, and she would stretch out her arms after him and pray to God to bring him back to her, and believed, too, that lie would do it.

Or —to go down to what you choose to Call the lower classes, where 1 lie is, of course, you think, bared of all romance und delicacy of sentiment—there is jour washerwoman, of whom you remember vaguely to have heard she had a drunken husband. You met the woman one day, too, and observed what a patient face she had, and that she was too thin and bent to undertake such heavy work. But that told you nothing of the commonplace story of a comfortable, pleasant home to which her husband brought her, or of how they lost it and came to live in the cellar of a tenement house near by. She remembers it every day; she remeniliers the handsome, sturdy young carpenter who used to come whistling home, and all the love and care which lie gave her then. There is not a loving word of that old time forgotten. How else could she pass over the years of misery and cruelty which she and her children have borne from the bloated, stupid wretch who lies there, and not hate and loathe him for them ? She does not bate him. She is tenderer,, more gentle with him than she was in those first days. She works for him like any slave; brings him out of the gin-shop, trusts in him, believes in him still, thinks that lie will comeback to her again as lie once was. Surely there are solitudes into which men go dow n more terrible than any Polar sea. and women who stand on the bank as faithful as she who sent out costly ships to bring back her beloved again. Surely, too, it is time that we Americans understood that this virtue and sanctity of married life is not a matter for rare dramatic exhibition, but the solid foundation of our strength and hope as a people. Let us have no more gusli or tampering with it by so-called friendship. It is a plant best let alone to find its own healthy growth, or, to change the figure, it is the salt just now of our own social life —which needs salt And if it lose its savor, that life is thenceforth fit for nothing but to be trampled under foot of meu.—A". Y. Tribune.