Much Married.

Woodville Examiner, Volume 3, Issue 284, 17 September 1886, Page 2 (Supplement)

Much Married.

Who would be imrried, I should like to know ? Don’t all at once. Bachelors , I know, would answer to a man, ‘‘ Wo would 1” Spinsters, to a woman, would answer, “Wo would!” Married beings of the masculine gender would call those benighted creatures “idiots.” Married beings of the female sex would call them “ wise ones.” Ila ! ha! pardon me, but, ha Iha ! I, Ferdinand Pickersgill, am a married man. When I was a boy, “and it doesn’t seem so very long ago,” they said of me, “ He has all his buttons about him, he has!” The most inveterateromancist would hardly dare to say that of me now. Every other morning I say to Eleanors, “My dear, this collar-button has not been sewn on yet." And she says, “ Then pin it up again, love.” lam sure the fortune our haberdasher must make by giving Eleanors farthing’s-worths in lieu of coin of the realm as change is something considerable. Every morning at the washstand I growl about having to fish the soap out of the slop-pail ; then I drop it (I wish somebody would invent a soap that isn’t slippery) ; then I try to pick it up, and if I am in a hurry that is a feat attended with a more than ordinary amount of difficulty—it flies sideways across the room and falls on a clean shirt-front, and irretrievably ruins it, as a clean one. I regain it for a moment, when it glides from my grasp like an eel with St. Vitus’ dance, and sopes—l / mean slopes—under the bed, where all efforts to reach it with the hand are unavailing ; then I try an umbrella handle, but that soap knows lamin a hurry. I kneel down and prod about, and ejaculate a series of adjurations ; and Eleanora, who has been watching my efforts with equanimity, not to say hilariousness, says, “Ferdy, if you persist in saying such things before me, I shall go home to my mother.” But she never goes. Then how she worries me about that hat, It is one of two fashions ago,—but really, with the hard times, and a growing family, a hat is a hat, and “ twa’ punds is twa' punds,” at least, four and six is four and six. Then again, I put on, yesterday, the very suit I wore that morning that made us one. As X was going out, she said, “Ferdinand, you are surely not going to leave the house in those beasts ?" By “ beasts ” she playfully alluded to my clothes. I said, “ Why not, Eleanora, why not?” She responded, “Because they are not fit to be seen !” I thought, “I have her now.” So I replied, triumphantly, “My love, this is the suit you so admired when we were married !” She said, “ Yes, it was decent, hai you've worn it ever since /” Somehow, I don’t think I “ had her ” quite so much as I expected to ; she took a mean advantage of me. But she always is good at mean advantages. She is mean. She has a little money of her own, and she keeps It. Her maiden name was Eleanora Blenkinton, and I believe she married me because, my name being “ Ferdinand Pickersgill,” she would only have to take the lower parts of the E. B. out of the marks in her linen, to make the letters into F. P. ( Signed) Frank Pickersgill.