the house where the bleak mountain wind would scarce allow
the wiry weed called hard-hack to gain a thorough footing; and on the
road-side sets out mere pipe-stems of young elms; though there is
no hope of any shade from them, except over the ruins of her great
granddaughter's gravestones; and won't wear caps, but plaits her gray
hair; and takes the Ladies' Magazine for the fashions; and always buys
her new almanac a month before the new year; and rises at dawn; and to
the warmest sunset turns a cold shoulder; and still goes on at odd hours
with her new course of history, and her French, and her music; and likes
a young company; and offers to ride young colts; and sets out young
suckers in the orchard; and has a spite against my elbowed old
grape-vine, and my club-footed old neighbor, and my claw-footed old
chair, and above all, high above all, would fain persecute, until death,
my high-mantled old chimney. By what perverse magic, I a thousand times
think, does such a very autumnal old lady have such a very vernal young
soul? When I would remonstrate at times, she spins round on me with,
"Oh, don't you grumble, old man (she always calls me old man), it's I,
young I, that keep you from stagnating." Well, I suppose it is so. Yea,
after all, these things are well ordered. My wife, as one of her poor
relations, good soul, intimates, is the salt of the earth, and none the
less the salt of my sea, which otherwise were unwholesome. She is its
monsoon, too, blowing a brisk gale over it, in the one steady direction
of my chimney.

Not insensible of her superior energies, my wife has frequently made
me propositions to take upon herself all the responsibilities of my
affairs. She is desirous that, domestically, I should abdicate; that,
renouncing further rule, like the venerable Charles V, I should retire
into some sort of monastery. But indeed, the chimney excepted, I have
little authority to lay down. By my wife's ingenious application of the
principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I
find myself, through my easy compliances, insensibly stripped by degrees
of one masculine prerogative after another. In a dream I go about my
fields, a sort of lazy, happy-go-lucky, good-for-nothing, loafing old
Lear. Only by some sudden revelation am I reminded who is over me; as
year before last, one day seeing in one corner of the premises fresh
deposits of mysterious boards and timbers, the oddity of the incident
a