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
dote 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.

Judge how to me, who, sitting in the comfortable shadow of my
chimney, smoking my comfortable pipe, with ashes not unwelcome at
my feet, and ashes not unwelcome all but in my mouth; and who am
thus in a comfortable sort of not unwelcome, though, indeed, ashy
enough way, reminded of the ultimate exhaustion even of the most
fiery life; judge how to me this unwarrantable vitality in my
wife must come, sometimes, it is true, with a moral and a calm,
but oftener with a breeze and a ruffle.