Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen, and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would allow to her.  William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the wheels of the world went too fast:—­a big man, appearing to be difficult to kill, though deeply smitten.  His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.  Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind, it was her comfort to die and not to know it.  This grievance was rooted in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant.  The sight of the plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.  “Plump ’em up, and make ’em dainty,” he advanced in contravention of his wife’s talk of bread and beef.

But he did not complain.  If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would come of having dainty children.  He could not deny that bread and beef made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were in the habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in the neighbourhood; so he was compelled to have recourse to secret discontent.  The attention, the time, and the trifles of money shed upon the flower garden, were hardships easier to bear.  He liked flowers, and he liked to hear the praise of his wife’s horticultural skill.  The garden was a distinguishing thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he walked home from church among full June roses, he felt the odour of them to be so like his imagined sensations of prosperity, that the deception was worth its cost.  Yet the garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow.  His wife had once wounded his vanity.  The massed vanity of a silent man, when it does take a wound, desires a giant’s vengeance; but as one can scarcely seek to enjoy that monstrous gratification when one’s wife is the offender, the farmer escaped from his dilemma by going apart into a turnip-field, and swearing, with his fist outstretched, never to forget it.  His wife had asked him, seeing that the garden flourished and the farm decayed, to yield the labour of the farm to the garden; in fact, to turn nurseryman under his wife’s direction.  The woman could not see that her garden drained the farm already, distracted the farm, and most evidently impoverished him.  She could not understand, that in permitting her, while he sweated fruitlessly, to give herself up to the occupation of a lady, he had followed the promptings of his native kindness, and certainly not of his native wisdom.  That she should deem herself `best man’ of the two, and suggest his stamping his name to such an opinion before the world, was an outrage.