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Did it ever occur to you, Adelbert, that your wife made a mistake also? Did it ever bore itself through your adamantine skull that it is not an unbroken round of gayety for a young girl to shut herself up in a lonesome house for three years, gradually acquiring children, and meantime being “sassed” by her husband because she is not a fluent conversationalist?

Wherein you offend me, Adelbert, is that you persist in breathing the air which human beings and other domestic animals more worthy than yourself are entitled to. There are too many such imitation men at large. There should be a law that would prohibit your getting up and walking on your hind legs and thus imposing on other mammals. If I could run the government for a few weeks, Adelbert, I would compel your style of zoological wonder to climb a tree and stay there.

So you married a woman who was far your inferior, did you? How did you do it? Where did you go to find a woman who could be your inferior and still keep out of the menagerie? Adelbert, I fear you do your wife a great injustice. With just barely enough vitality to hand your name down to posterity and blast the fair future of Dakota by leaving your trade-mark on future generations, you snivel and whine over your blasted life! If your life had been blasted a little harder twenty years ago, the life of your miserable little wife would have been less blasted.

If you had acquired a little more croup twenty years ago, Dakota would have been ahead. Why did you go on year after year, permitting people to believe you were a man, when you could have undeceived them in two minutes by crawling into a hollow log and remaining there?

Your penmanship is very good. It is better than your chances for a bright immortality beyond the grave. Write to me again whenever you feel lonesome or want advice. I was a young married man myself once, and I know what they have to endure. Up to the time of my marriage, I had never known a harsher tone than a flute note; my early life ran quiet as the clear brook by which I sported, and so on. I was a great belle in society, also. I attended all the swell balls and parties in our county for years. Wherever you found fair women and brave men tripping the light bombastic toe, you would also find me. “Sometimes I played second violin, and sometimes I called off.”