e comfortable shadow of my chimney,
smoking my comfortable pipe, with ashes not unwelcome at my feet,
and ashes not unwelcome all but in my mouth; and who am thus in a
comfortable sort of not unwelcome, though, indeed, ashy enough way,
reminded of the ultimate exhaustion even of the most fiery life; judge
how to me this unwarrantable vitality in my wife must come, sometimes,
it is true, with a moral and a calm, but oftener with a breeze and a
ruffle.

If the doctrine be true, that in wedlock contraries attract, by how
cogent a fatality must I have been drawn to my wife! While spicily
impatient of present and past, like a glass of ginger-beer she overflows
with her schemes; and, with like energy as she puts down her foot, puts
down her preserves and her pickles, and lives with them in a continual
future; or ever full of expectations both from time and space, is ever
restless for newspapers, and ravenous for letters. Content with the
years that are gone, taking no thought for the morrow, and looking for
no new thing from any person or quarter whatever, I have not a single
scheme or expectation on earth, save in unequal resistance of the undue
encroachment of hers.

Old myself, I take to oldness in things; for that cause mainly loving
old Montague, and old cheese, and old wine; and eschewing young people,
hot rolls, new books, and early potatoes and very fond of my old
claw-footed chair, and old club-footed Deacon White, my neighbor, and
that still nigher old neighbor, my betwisted old grape-vine, that of a
summer evening leans in his elbow for cosy company at my window-sill,
while I, within doors, lean over mine to meet his; and above all, high
above all, am fond of my high-mantled old chimney. But she, out of the
infatuate juvenility of hers, takes to nothing but newness; for that
cause mainly, loving new cider in autumn, and in spring, as if she were
own daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, fairly raving after all sorts of salads
and spinages, and more particularly green cucumbers (though all the time
nature rebukes such unsuitable young hankerings in so elderly a person,
by never permitting such things to agree with her), and has an itch
after recently-discovered fine prospects (so no graveyard be in the
background), and also after Sweden-borganism, and the Spirit Rapping
philosophy, with other new views, alike in things natural and unnatural;
and immortally hopeful, is forever making new flower-beds even on the
north side of