If the doctrine be true, that in wedlock contraries attract, by
how cogent a fatality must I have been drawn to my wife! While
spicily impatient of present and past, like a glass of
ginger-beer she overflows with her schemes; and, with like energy
as she puts down her foot, puts down her preserves and her
pickles, and lives with them in a continual future; or ever full
of expectations both from time and space, is ever restless for
newspapers, and ravenous for letters. Content with the years that
are gone, taking no thought for the morrow, and looking for no
new thing from any person or quarter whatever, I have not a
single scheme or expectation on earth, save in unequal resistance
of the undue encroachment of hers.

Old myself, I take to oldness in things; for that cause mainly
loving old Montague, and old cheese, and old wine; and eschewing
young people, hot rolls, new books, and early potatoes and very
fond of my old claw-footed chair, and old club-footed Deacon
White, my neighbor, and that still nigher old neighbor, my
betwisted old grape-vine, that of a summer evening leans in his
elbow for cosy company at my window-sill, while I, within doors,
lean over mine to meet his; and above all, high above all, am
fond of my high-mantled old chimney. But she, out of the
infatuate juvenility of hers, takes to nothing but newness; for
that cause mainly, loving new cider in autumn, and in spring, as
if she were own daughter of Nebuchadnezzar, fairly raving after
all sorts of salads and spinages, and more particularly green
cucumbers (though all the time nature rebukes such unsuitable
young hankerings in so elderlv a person, by never permitting such
things to agree with her), and has an itch after recently-