HOW I BECAME A BENEDICT.
BY EMMA GARRISON JONES.
Yes, I'm a married man at last! That's my wife sitting over there in the great rocking-chair, that slender, delicate creature, with the soft, creamy face, and lustrous, golden hair; and that queer, little thing in her lap, over which she coos so tenderly, is my son and heir, Chancellor Trowbridge, Jr. Heavens! what a feeling of importance it gives a fellow to know that his name will live after his body is under the sods! I never knew what it was to be a man before; I'm one now, every inch of me, as Lear was every inch a king.
A woman-hater! That's what I've been called all my life, and the cognomen was not misapplied. I did hate women, and excluded myself from their society, and railed and sneered at their frailties until Well, until that little woman yonder glorified the whole feminine gender for me! I'm a changed man. I can't pass a bit of female apparel in a shop window, a water-fall, or a knot of ribbon, without a tender thrill at my heart. I'm an old fool, that's about the amount of it! No matter, fill up your meerschaum, my wife does not object to smoke-sensible women never do!
Twenty years ago! Bless my soul, what a long way to look back! Such a misty, winding road, cut across at every turn by the grassgreen graves of dead friends and blighted hopes! Ah, me! I would not go back and tread it all over again, if I could! Twenty years ago I met with my first disappointment, and it made me a misanthrope, a woman-hater! I was a young stripling, then, just sixteen, the sole idol and comfort of an overfond mother . We lived all alone in a little nest of a cottage, just out from the city; and mother did the housework, and managed the small dairy, from which we derived our support, while I attended the academy. She was bent upon making a great man of me, poor, fond mother! She confidently believed that I possessed any amount of undeveloped talent, and denied herself a thousand little comforts, in order to secure for me the advantages necessary to bring it into action. Looking back upon those days now . it affords me a kind of melancholy satisfaction to know that she went to her eternal rest, happily unconscious that all her unselfish labor had been spent for naught; still fancying, in the egoism of her love, that "her boy," as she called me, would one day cover himself with the lustre of great deeds.
I shared her belief, then ; and when my sixteenth year, and my academical course both culminated at once, and poor mother expended the hoardings of an entire year to purchase me a new cloth suit, I thought my fortune made. As a matter of course, the next step to be taken was matrimony. By way of beginning, I set myself to work to get up a poem, to be dedicated to the fair one of my choice, Miss Jessie Weaver. The composition consumed a round week. Day after day I shut myself in my bedchamber, and racked my brains over rhyming syllables, while poor mother drove the cows to and fro, and even brought the water to cool her milk-pans. At last it was finished, and elaborately copied on scented, rose- colored paper. There were some two dozen verses, I think, containing swashy sentiment, and morbid melancholy, sufficient to stock a regiment of ordinary novels; but sitting on the stone-steps of the dairy, with her butter-paddle in her hand, mother listened while I read them to her in a confident, declamatory style, her loving eyes full of subdued exultation.
“I always thought so! I always thought you'd make a great man, my boy," she said, proudly.
I sent the poem to Jessie, with no doubt whatever in regard to its reception. I held too high an opinion of her good sense to believe, for an instant, that she would fail to appreciate it; and she didn't, as her gay laugh and dancing eyes attested at our next meeting.
“You'll be famous by-and-by, Chancy," she called after me over the garden-gate; “a second Byron."
I stroked my sprouting mustache with serene self-complacency, running my eye over the rich meadow-lands, and alluvial fields, surrounding her father's stately mansion. She was an only child, and would inherit all this wealth. I had made up my mind to propose to her on my next visit; and it would be the proper thing to make her a present on such an occasion.
There was a gay, ruby-brooch on exhibition in one of the shop-windows, and on this I had set my heart; but the price was twenty- tre
