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- 9235
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- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z
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- 9179
- text
- warm mass of masonry. Better for wines is it than voyages to the Indies;
my chimney itself a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is
as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think how
grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife’s geraniums bud
there! Bud in December. Her eggs, too--can’t keep them near the chimney,
on account of hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.
How often my wife was at me about that projected grand entrance-hall of
hers, which was to be knocked clean through the chimney, from one end of
the house to the other, and astonish all guests by its generous
amplitude. ‘But, wife,’ said I, ‘the chimney--consider the chimney: if
you demolish the foundation, what is to support the superstructure?’
‘Oh, that will rest on the second floor.’ The truth is, women know next
to nothing about the realities of architecture. However, my wife still
talked of running her entries and partitions. She spent many long nights
elaborating her plans; in imagination building her boasted hall through
the chimney, as though its high mightiness were a mere spear of
sorrel-top. At last, I gently reminded her that, little as she might
fancy it, the chimney was a fact--a sober, substantial fact, which, in
all her plannings, it would be well to take into full consideration. But
this was not of much avail.
And here, respectfully craving her permission, I must say a few words
about this enterprising wife of mine.[12] Though in years nearly old as
myself, in spirit she is young as my little sorrel mare, Trigger, that
threw me last fall. What is extraordinary, though she comes of a
rheumatic family, she is straight as a pine, never has any aches; while
for me with the sciatica, I am sometimes as crippled up as any old
apple-tree. But she has not so much as a toothache. As for her
hearing--let me enter the house in my dusty boots, and she away up in
the attic. And for her sight--Biddy, the housemaid, tells other people’s
housemaids, that her mistress will spy a spot on the dresser straight
through the pewter platter, put up on purpose to hide it. Her faculties
are alert as her limbs and her senses. No danger of my spouse dying of
torpor. The longest night in the year I’ve known her lie awake, planning
her campaign for the morrow. She is a natural projector. The maxim,
‘Whatever is, is right,’ is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is, is
wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is still more, must
be altered right away. Dreadful maxim for the wife of a dozy old dreamer
like me, who dotes on seventh days as days of rest, and out of a
sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a week day, go out of my road a
quarter of a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at work.
That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been
just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would
have set in order that huge, littered empire of the one, and with
indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for the
other.
But the most wonderful thing is, my wife never thinks of her end. Her
youthful incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of
death, hardly seems Christian. Advanced in years, as she knows she must
be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem on, and be inexhaustible
forever. She doesn’t believe in old age. At that strange promise in the
plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham’s, would not have
jeeringly laughed within herself.
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