oided all difficulties. _E sempre bene._

If your wife fails to appreciate the excessive confidence, and
dissipates in one day a large proportion of your fortune, in the first
place it is not probable that this prodigality will amount to one-third
of the revenue which you have been saving for ten years; moreover you
will learn, from the Meditation on _Catastrophes_, that in the very
crisis produced by the follies of your wife, you will have brilliant
opportunities of slaying the Minotaur.

But the secret of the treasure which has been amassed by your
thoughtfulness need never be known till after your death; and if you
have found it necessary to draw upon it, in order to assist your wife,
you must always let it be thought that you have won at play, or made a
loan from a friend.

These are the true principles which should govern the conjugal budget.

The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one
instance which will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who
resort to severe measures to keep watch over themselves as well as over
their wives.

An old miser who lived at T-----, a pleasure resort if there ever was
one, had married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in
her and so jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave up
trade in order to guard his wife more closely, but his only real change
was that his covetousness took another form. I acknowledge that I owe
the greater portion of the observations contained in this essay, which
still is doubtless incomplete, to the person who made a study of this
remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray which, one single detail will
be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the country, this husband
never went to bed without secretly raking over the pathways of his park,
and he had a special rake for the sand of his terraces. He had made
a close study of the footprints made by the different members of his
household; and early in the morning he used to go and identify the
tracks that had been made there.

"All this is old forest land," he used to say to the person I have
referred to, as he showed him over the park; "for nothing can be seen
through the brushwood."

His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the
town. This passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in the
hearts of the two lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look exchanged
in a crowded ball-room; and while they danced tog