expect to be
married before that time, and I do not intend to be separated from my
wife. Will she have the privilege of accompanying me among these
competing vegetables? And last month they made me director of a
turnpike company--I suppose because it runs through my farm. To-day at
a meeting of the directors I said, 'Gentlemen, how far is this turnpike
to run? I will direct it to the end of my farm and not a step farther.
I do not wish to be separated from my wife.'"

Georgiana has teased me a good deal in my life. It is well to let a
woman taste of the tree of knowledge whose fruit she is fond of
dispensing.

"You'd better be careful!" she said, archly.

"Remember, I haven't married you yet."

"I _am_ careful," I replied. "I haven't married _you_ yet, cither! My
idea, Georgiana," I continued, "is to plant a grove and raise cocoons.
That would gratify my love of nature and your fancy for silk dresses.
I could have my silk woven and spun in our manufactory at Newport,
Kentucky; and you know that we couldn't possibly lose each other among
the mulberry-trees."

"You'd better take care!" she repeated. "Do you expect to talk to me
in this style after we are married?"

"That will all depend upon how you talk to me," I answered. "But I
have always understood married life to be the season when the worm
begins to turn."

Despite my levity, I have been secretly stricken with remorse at the
monstrous selfishness that lay coiled like a canker in my words. I was
really no better than those men who say to their wives:

"While I was trying to win you, the work of my life was secondary--you
were everything. Now that I have won you, it will be everything, and
you must not stand in the way."

But the thought is insupportable that Georgiana should not be happy
with me at any cost. I divine now the reason of the effort she has
long been making to win me from nature; therefore of my own free will I
have privately set about changing the character of my life with the
idea of suiting it to some other work in which she too may be content.
And thus it has come about that during the August now ended--always the
month of the year in which my nature will go its solitary way and seek
its woodland peace--I have hung about the town as one who is offered
for hire to a master whom he has never seen and for a work that he
hates to do. Many of the affairs that engage the passions of my
fellow-beings are to me as the gray stubble t