“Love in a hut with water and a crust,
Is—­Love forgive us!—­cinders, ashes, dust!”

If Love were really there, “cinders, ashes, dust” could not be, and the water and crust may, by our Mary’s skillful treatment, be transformed into a refreshing beverage and an appetizing entree.  My faith in the powers of John’s wife is great, and if John be satisfied, and tells her that he has the best little love-mate and housekeeper in the world, can she complain?

CHAPTER V.

A MISTAKE ON JOHN’S PART.

It is not discreditable to the sex to assert that a man is first attracted marriage-ward by the desire of the eye.  He falls in love, as a rule, because she who presently becomes the only woman in the universe to him is goodly to view, if not actually beautiful.  Goodliness being largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for John—­up to the marriage-day.  He who descries signs of slatternliness in his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment.  As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest work, and spares her pretty daughter’s hands and clothes all the soil and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally indifferent to what occupies so much of other women’s thoughts, if she do not always appear in her lover’s presence neatly and—­to the best of her ability—­becomingly attired.  She quickly acquaints herself with his taste in the matter of women’s costumes, and adapts hers to it, wearing his favorite colors, giving preference to the gowns he has praised, and arranging her hair in the fashion he has chanced to admire in her hearing.

In the work-a-day world of matrimonial life, much of all this undergoes a change.  Washington Irving lived and died a fastidious, unpractical bachelor, or he might have modified the sketch of “The Wife,” the Mary who, after unpacking trunks, washing china, pots and kettles, putting closets to rights, laying carpets, hanging pictures, clearing away straw, sawdust, and what in that day corresponded with jute—­dusting and shelving books—­and performing the hundred other duties contingent upon sitting down in the modest cottage hired by her bankrupt husband,—­got tea ready (presumably preparing potatoes for the same) picked a big mess of strawberries from a bed opportunely discovered in the garden, donned a white muslin robe and sat down to the piano to while away a lagging hour while awaiting her Leslie’s return.

The John of our common-sensible age knows in his sober mind that his bride, in the effort to accomplish one-fourth as much, would equip herself in a brown gingham, tie a big apron before her, draw a pair of his discarded gloves with truncated fingers upon her hands, and be too tired at night to do more than boil the kettle for the cup of tea which he is more than likely to drink at the kitchen table, spread with a newspaper—­the linen not having been yet dug out of the case in which “mother and the girls” packed it.