at there is no room for
improvement, for with him it is much the same as it is with the wild
strawberry. At first blush one would say that there could be no more
delicious flavor than that of the wild strawberry. Yet everybody knows
what the skilled gardeners have made of it in the form of the
cultivated fruit. Nevertheless, the crude article, found growing wild
upon its native heath, is much to be preferred to the candied ginger
of other nations.

After admitting that the wild strawberry is capable of cultivation,
and even attaining, under skilful care, the highest type of
perfection, let no one make the mistake of thinking that the time for
such improvement is after they have been grown and placed upon the
market. If they are found to be knotty, half green, or in a state of
decadence, and you are bound to buy strawberries, you can take them,
and, by your native woman's wit, you can dress them into a state of
palatableness, even if you have to reduce them to a pulp in the sacred
mysteries of a short-cake.

But in order to take all the comfort which strawberries are capable of
giving to mankind, they should be perfect in themselves when they come
from the hand of the gardener--just as it was his mother's duty to
have trained that husband of yours before he came under your
influence.

It really is asking too much of a woman to expect her to bring up a
husband and her children too. She vainly imagines, when she marries
this piece of perfection, with whom she is so blindly in love, that he
is already trained, or, rather, that he is the one human being in the
world who has been perfect from infancy, and who never needed
training. She never dreams of the curious fact that mothers always
train their daughters to make good wives, yet rarely ever think of
training their boys to make good husbands.

Therefore, unless, like Topsy, they have "just growed" good and kind
and considerate, a woman has a life-work before her in training her
own husband.

But the fact of the matter is that while we girls receive specific
training, to the express end of making good wives, the boys of the
family receive only general training of chivalry and courtesy towards
all women--not with a view of having to spend the greater part of
their lives with one woman, or the tact with which this one woman must
be treated.

I wonder what would happen if somebody should open a Select
Kindergarten for Embryo Husbands? Yet we girls have been in a simil