University of Virginia Library

HIS WIFE'S MOTHER.

THEY had been having pancakes since the Ist of February. He was an economical man, and thought fifty-cent molasses was good enough. She was a trifle more refined in her taste, and yearned for sirups; but, being a patient and meek woman, she gave up the struggle for the desire of her heart, and quietly submitted to his decision. Last Friday her mother made them her first visit. She is a woman large of bone, quick of thought, and amply adapted to tussle with the problems of life. She didn't take to the cheap adornment of the pancakes, and asked her daughter why she didn't have sirup.

"These cakes are too good to be smeared with such stuff," she asserted in a tone of disgust.

The wife made a feeble reply, while the husband smiled grimly to himself.

"Can't you get sirup in Danbury?" she asked him.

"I s'pose so."

"Then I shall expect some for my breakfast to-morrow morning," she said, looking straight at him.

Next morning the pitcher of molasses was on the table. She picked it up, and smelled of the contents.

"Faugh!" she exclaimed, lifting her nose: "where's that sirup?"

"I didn't get it," said he, without looking up.

"Did you forget it?" she asked, opening her lips as little as possible to say the words.

"No."

"Why didn't you get it, then?"

"Because it costs more than I want to pay."

"Oh!"

There was a moment's pause after this ejaculation, during which he raised his eyes to leer at her, but dropped them again, and moved uneasily in his chair.

"You never seem to think of the cost when you want a cigar or a drink of liquor, or to go off alone to a place of amusement," she said, looking straight

at his depressed face; "but, when any thing better than tar is wanted at home for pancakes, the cost is a matter of some importance. If you had a stomach that was half human, you couldn't eat it."

"It's good enough for me; an' what's good enough for me must be good enough for others," he doggedly growled.

There was a jump, the sound of an overturning chair and crockery; and she was standing up, with one hand convulsively grasped in his hair, and the other clutching the pitcher of offence. His face was pressed against the table.

"Lemme up!" he yelled.

"It's good enough for you, is it?" she cried. "Well, you shall have the whole of it."

And she turned the contents over his head, and worked it in his hair, and down his neck, and in his ears, while he spluttered and screamed and whined, and struggled with all his might to release himself; but he was like a baby in the hands of a giant.

When she got through, she coolly proceeded to the sink, and deliberately washed her hands, while he sat there, quivering all over, and staring at her with an expression in his eyes that tallied admirably with the erect condition of his hair.

He was two full hours getting that stuff out of his hair; but it was not wasted time. A gallon of the best sirup was sent up to the house within an hour after he went down; and when she returned

home, four days later, he hired a carriage expressly to take her to the cars. When she came, she had to walk from the depot.