gation, if I neglect his essay on Human Responsibilities; Professor Verdigriss will speak sneeringly of me to his class, If I am not prepared with an opinion of his article about the Retrocession of Solar Paradoxes; and Mrs. Winkle's Blighted Buds must be reviewed for my next number. How am I to do all these things, and read that woman's tremendous manuscript! I was a madman to make such a promise! The deuce take her! But I will not be so caught again."
He gave strict orders that no woman, under any circumstances whatever, should ever again be permitted to enter his sanctum; and after spending a few more hours at his dreary employment, he went home to his wife, solacing himself with the recollection of his domestic happiness, and repeating to himself a quatrain from some verses which he had addressed to his Maria Jane before their marriage:
The weary worker seeks respose,
And in thy food affections blest
He finds a cure for all his woes."
A cure for all his woes!" he repented to himself, as he put his night-key in the door, and bounding up-stairs into the boudoir of his Maria, was suddenly arrested by discovering her in tears.
Maria Jane in tears! The heart of Smilax was smitten by the sight, and his anxiety to learn the cause of her first sorrow may readily be imagined by husbands who have had a similar experience—and what hushand has not?
But he then learned that when a wife is most afflicted, there is nothing the matter with her. Mrs. Smilax continued to weep, and at every appeal of her husband, to enlighten him as to the cause of her grief, she would only reply, "Nothing!"
But Smilax knew perfectly well that "nothing," in this case, meant something dire and calamitous to his domestic peace. After a while, the torrent of his wife's grief subsided into a sullen and reproachful melancholy, more hard to endure than the most terrifying outbursts of grief and passion.
Maria Jane was not one of the Queen Catharine style of wives; she calmly subsided into the injured innocence state, and personated
