Mrs. Davis

“ Am I to spend my prime in totting up parsnips, and computing carrots, and comptrolling washing-bills? I sighed again, and in the act, off dew the button of my neck-band, as though some superior power had seasonably sent the accident to remind me of my helplessness.
The button settled the business; though, as it slipped down inside my shirt, and passed with its mother-o’-pearl coldness over my heart, it for a moment threatened to chill my matrimonial resolution. I pitied my own lonely state, and pity, we know, is akin to love. ”

“ HOW AN ADVERTISEMENT GOT A WIFE.
How an advertisement got a wife “Tobacco is the tomb of love,” writes a modern novelist of high standing; but, with every respect for his authority, I beg to say it was quite the contrary in my case.
Twenty-one years ago, I was sitting by my fireside, totting up innumerable pages of my bachelor's housekeeping-book, taking exercise in arithmetic on long columns of “petty cash” — comprising items for carrots and Bath-bricks, metal tacks and mutton chops—until, tired and wearied, I arrived at the sum total, and jerked the book on the mantelpiece. ”

“ Accordingly I thought of an advertisement; yet with no practical design of doing business, but, as I persuaded myself, for a joke. So I scratched with a pencil on the back of a letter, the following: —
WANTED A WIFE. — None but principals need apply. The advertiser does not require cash, but only a companion. He is six -and -twenty, and, tired of single, he thinks he can settle down to married, life. As men go, he believes he has a moderate share of temper, and want of time is his only reason for having recourse to the newspapers. ”