the chimney, as though its high mightiness were a mere spear
of sorrel-top. At last, I gently reminded her that, little as she might
fancy it, the chimney was a fact--a sober, substantial fact, which, in
all her plannings, it would be well to take into full consideration. But
this was not of much avail.

And here, respectfully craving her permission, I must say a few words
about this enterprising wife of mine. Though in years nearly old as
myself, in spirit she is young as my little sorrel mare, Trigger,
that threw me last fall. What is extraordinary, though she comes of a
rheumatic family, she is straight as a pine, never has any aches; while
for me with the sciatica, I am sometimes as crippled up as any
old apple-tree. But she has not so much as a toothache. As for her
hearing--let me enter the house in my dusty boots, and she away up in
the attic. And for her sight--Biddy, the housemaid, tells other people's
housemaids, that her mistress will spy a spot on the dresser straight
through the pewter platter, put up on purpose to hide it. Her faculties
are alert as her limbs and her senses. No danger of my spouse dying of
torpor. The longest night in the year I've known her lie awake, planning
her campaign for the morrow. She is a natural projector. The maxim,
"Whatever is, is right," is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is, is
wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is still more, must
be altered right away. Dreadful maxim for the wife of a dozy old
dreamer like me, who dote on seventh days as days of rest, and out of a
sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a week day, go out of my road a
quarter of a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at work.

That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been
just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would
have set in order that huge littered empire of the one, and with
indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for the
other.

But the most wonderful thing is, my wife never thinks of her end. Her
youthful incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of
death, hardly seems Christian. Advanced in years, as she knows she must
be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem on, and be inexhaustible
forever. She doesn't believe in old age. At that strange promise in
the plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham's, would not have
jeeringly laughed within herself.

Judge how to me, who, sitting in th