Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 February 1877 — A Wife’s Strategy. [ARTICLE]

A Wife’s Strategy.

Women desirous of reforming their lords and. masters who are given to quaffing the cup which cheers and inebriates, should take a leaf out of the book of an estimable and clever lady on the West Bide. Her husband, alas! is given to coming home at what the fashion reporter calls “ a late, or, rather, an early hour,” with his legs tied in double bow-knots and his speech about three feet thick. Does she jaw him, or threaten to go home to her mother, and put to him the unanswerable conumdrum: “O, why did I ever marry you?” and burst into tears, or lapse into an aggressive silence? Not much, she doesn’t. She just waits till next morning, and then brings him a hair of the dog which bit him, with a dash of seltzer in it, and prattles to him pleasantly, and devises a breakfast that picks him up thoroughly, and generally behaves to him In a generous and oblivions manner. These coals of fire soon melt his rugged aature, and, as he begins to look ashamed of himself, she sayß: “ Algernon, I do so wish you wouldn’t drink. You are, when sober, the best of husbands; but not when you have put an enemy into your mouth to steal away your brains. Last nisrht vou sat down at the table and called rot ‘2fwei !’ or some horrid thing like that, and then yelling: ‘Ain’t you going to fetch them beers?’ seized me oy the throat and, catching up the carving-knife, wanted to cut the children’s throats? If you don’t believe me, there is the knife before your own eyes. Thank Heaven, with the energy of despair, I was able to cling to you till you fell over the sewing machine and went to sleep with your head in my ■worlf-basket, singing 4 Happy be thy Ireamsl’” “Great Caesar!” says he, “did I do that, Maud?” “Dia you? Why, of course you did; but, my love, 1 know you were not yourself, for you would not hurt a hair of our heads if you knew what you were doing.” He, of course, doesn’t recollect anything about it, and considers it queer that the carvingknife should be on the sitting-room table at 2:30 a. m., but he falls a victim to circumstantial evidence, and, shuddering at the idea that he might have been a murderer, goes light on it for Awhile. Next time he goes on a spree she confiscates all his money except his small change, and tells him that when he came home he bellowed wildly, “ ’Tie mine, ’tis his,(and has been slave to thousands!” and threw all his money into the stove, threatening to brain her with the poker if she approached ere the crematory process had been concluded. Next time she Bhows him some silk and felt scraps as the remnants of her new hat which he tore to fragments in his wild rage, and he had to ante up for another one. Altogether she has played that husliand so completely that he has resolved to sign the temperance pledge and present it to her as a Christmas gift, and he means to keep it, too. The fun oi it is that whenever that husband gets drunk he is the most amiable and harmless of men, and that all his desperate attempts at suicide, arion and wife-butchery are sheer inven tions. —Chicago Tribune.