they made such a strife,
I was forced to go to London to buy myself a wife.
The roads were so bad, and the lanes were so narrow,
I had to bring my wife home in a wheelbarrow.
The wheelbarrow broke. My wife had a fall;
Deuce take the wheelbarrow, my wife, and all.

The above lines were written when the author was quite advanced in
years; when he had solved, in his humble way, the great problem of life,
and discovered the futility of mundane things generally, and t
undesirableness of an unsuccessful or unfortunate existence; when he
could look back through a long vista of years, and see the follies of
his youth and the mistakes of his manhood. It should have been placed at
the end of his book, with only the word Finis after it; but somehow,
either by mistake of the author or of the publisher, it was placed among
the records of the simple events of the village, and thus loses half its
force. However, let the history, placed as it is, be a warning to rash
young men who contemplate matrimony; and let them give heed to it, lest
they also have cause to repent of their doings and exclaim with the
poet:--

"The deuce take it."

Observe how pathetic and touching his reminiscence of his lost youth and
the priceless boon of liberty. He commences in a quiet descriptive way,
leaving one at a loss to know whether it is to be a joyful lyric a dirge
he intends singing.

"When I was a bachelor I lived by myself;
All the bread and cheese I had I laid upon the shelf."

Here we have him alone, at peace with himself and the world; happy in
the contemplation of his beloved muse; jotting down, now and then, the
brilliant ideas that flash through his teeming brain; and munching in
solitude his homely meal of bread and cheese. In telling us he laid his
bread and cheese upon the shelf, he at once shows he had left his
parental abode, and the ministering and watchful care of his maternal
parent.

There must, of course, have been a cause for such a step. Some reason
why the gentle being should have been wrought up to that pitch, when he
daringly throws off all restraint, and steps into the world to act and
think for himself. It may have been the want of sympathy that drove him
to the act. They were plain folks, and didn't appreciate his peculiar
turn of mind, and so only laughed at him, and ridiculed his pretensions.
That there was a quarrel there is no manner of doubt, and it was
probably caused by the mor