The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this
world is a woman's heart. Why some graceful and most amiable women
whom I know will persist in loving some men whom I also know, is
more than I know. I will not call their love an exhibition of
perverseness, though it looks like it; but that these men with
these rich, sweet hearts in their hands, grow sour and snappish,
and surly and tyrannical and exacting, is the most unaccountable
thing in the world. If a pig will not allow himself to be driven,
he will follow a man who offers him corn, and he will eat the
corn, even though he puts his feet in the trough; but there are
men--some of them of Christian professions--who take every
tenderness their wives bring them, and every expression of
affection, and every service, and every yearning sympathy, and
trample them under feet without tasting them, and without a look
of gratitude in their eyes. Hard, cold, thin-blooded, white-livered,
contemptible curmudgeons--they think their wives weak and
foolish, and themselves wise and dignified! I beg my readers to
assist me in despising them. I do not feel adequate to the task of
doing them justice.

There is another exhibition of perverseness which we sometimes see
in families. There will be, perhaps, from two to half a dozen
sisters in a family, amiable all of them. Now, think of the
reasons which should bind them together in the tenderest sympathy.
They were born of the same mother, they were nursed at the same
heart, they were cradled under the same roof by the same hand,
they have knelt at the side of the same father, their interests,
trials, associates, standing--every thing concerning their family
and social life--are the same. The honor of one intimately
concerns the honor of the other, yet I have known such families of