to pirt off the evil day.  Sometimes the husband is merely the care-worn drudge who provides what the wife squanders.  Have you not known such a thing as that a man should be labouring under an Indian sun, and cutting down every personal expense to the last shilling, that he might send a liberal allowance to his wife in England; while she meanwhile was recklessly spending twice what was thus sent her; running up overwhelming accounts, dashing about to public balls, paying for a bouquet what cost the poor fellow far away much thought to save, giving costly entertainments at home, filling her house with idle and empty-headed scapegraces, carrying on scandalous flirtations; till it becomes a happy thing, if the certain ruin she is bringing on her husband’s head is cut short by the needful interference of Sir Cresswell Cresswell?  There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker.  And even where things are not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year determinedly act in various respects as if they had as many thousands.  The dinner given by a man with eight hundred a year, in certain regions of the earth which I could easily point out, is, as regards food, wine, and attendance, precisely the same as the dinner given by another man who has five thousand a year.  When will this end?  When will people see its silliness?  In truth, you do not really, as things are in this country, make many people better off by adding a little or a good deal to their yearly income.  For in all probability they were living up to the very extremity of their means before they got the addition; and in all probability the first thing they do, on getting the addition, is so far to increase their establishment and their expense that it is just as hard a struggle as ever to make the ends meet.  It would not be a pleasant arrangement, that a man who was to be carried across the straits from England to France, should be fixed on a board so weighted that his mouth and nostrils should be at the level of the water, and thus that he should be struggling for life, and barely escaping drowning all the way.  Yet hosts of people, whom no one proposes to put under restraint, do as regards their income and expenditure a precisely analogous thing.  They deliberately weight themselves to that degree that their heads are barely above water, and that any unforeseen emergency dips their heads under.  They rent a house a good deal dearer than they can justly afford; and they have servants more and more expensive than they ought; and by many such things they make sure that their progress through life shall be a drowning struggle; while, if they would rationally resolve and manfully confess that they cannot afford to have things as richer folk have them, and arrange their way of living in accordance with what they can afford, they would enjoy the feeling of ease and comfort; they