The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1882-08-26
A YANKEE ATALANTA.

A chime of tea bells rang out along
the broad street of Charlton as DR.. My
rick, perched in his high-swung sulky,
drove YEARLY homeward through the
biting air. To hungry man the cheer
full tinkle pleasantly suggested the
thought of creature comforts. But the
thought of creature comforts unpleas-
antly suggested their natural entail of
bills. He recalled the unpaid scores of
these tormentors rustling in the hollow
bronze globe, by whose weight bronze
Atlas standing on his office table seemed
quite bent and overcome. No wonder,
either, thought the eare-worn doctor.
His own world often seemed to contain
nothing but bills, and that the stoop in
his own shoulders had come of their I'M
lifting load he knew.
1t was Mrs. Myrick's last Christmas
gift to him-that costly inutility. When
he kissed her, with thanks, his prophetic
soul misgave him that the bill would be
sent in at the moment he could least af-
ford to pay, if one hour of his wearing
year were distinguishable from another
in that respect. But he had long since
discovered that his wife had fiscal
genius unrivalled among her sex, save
by that able tinancier, Mrs Micawber
She declared that the explanation of
their embarrassments lay in the fact that
the doctor constantly mislaid his bills,
and so of course paid most of them twice
over. When, therefore, she had ap-
pointed to office, so to speak,
this pagan Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer, and had made it daily duty
to put all new or stray evidences of debt
into his grim keeping, she really felt
that the Myrick family stood once more
on sound financial basis, or if they did
not, that it was certainly no fault of
hers.
Meantime she went on as she had
always done, committing endless extrav-
agances in the name of economy, and
heaping up bills against the day of bills.
Had she been one of the ten virgins for
whom the bridegroom called, her lamp
would have been found neither full nor
empty; she would long since have ex-
changed it altogether, much under value,
for highly recommended self-Eghting-
and-feeding perpetual burner, certain
under no circumstances to ignite. This
system of barter and substitution ami
mated the housekeeping, devastating as
it went.
But however spent and troubled DR..
Myrick might be, he never suffered him
self to be impatient with his wife. He
was eminently Just man. He remem-
bered that she was unaltered from the
smiling beauty of seventeen whom he
had passionately wooed, vowing, after
the manner of lovers, that not for worlds
would he have had her other than she
was. No strong-minded, aggressive,
unsexed creature for him, he had gone
so far as to say, in the wisdom of his
postgraduate experience, but tender,
clinging, sweet, adorable maiden, whose
strength was her weakness, and who
should clothe his roughness with her
grace. In short, the oak and the vine,
though hackneyed as to the metaphor,
seemed to him quite the correct thing as
to sentiment,
At thirty-tive his Mary was just as pref
ty, Just as useless, just as incapable of
serious effort, just as inane, just as low
ing, just as sweet-tempered, as on their
wedding day. TWAS the care-worn man
OF forty-two who had left the impulsive
boy of twenty-four so far behind him
that he could no longer comprehend the
passion of that foolish young fellow for
a beautiful doll. 1t seemed impossible
that he, Arthur Myrick, knowing what q
wise, careful, high-minded wife might
have done for him in essence and estate
during these eighteen years, could ever
have quoted with approval, to the girl he
loved, Coleridge's sentiment that the
perfection of character in a woman is to
be characterless.
Yethe remembered he had perpetrated
that very idiocy, and he acknowledged
that he had no right to whimper now
that his pleasant vice of sentiment
tally had been made an instrument
to plague him. All that he had rea-
son to expect from his Mary-love
for himself and his children-he had
received in full measure. And he
would have held himself caitiff indeed
could he have visited upon her blameless
head his own sins of blinded Judgment,
of dull perception, and of an ignoble
worship which exacted no nobleness of
its object.
Over the cradles of his five daughters
he had suffered pangs of apprehension
and self-reproach lest they had been
born to make the lives of other men as
hard and empty as his who had begotten
them. Through each successive year
his own domestic vine had chung and
clambered closer about its supporting
oak, precisely as he had invitedit to do.
He knew that the innocent bloomy
growth had sapped his vitality and
thriven on his decay. And he vowed a
vow to Heaven that each of his little
maids should grow up strong bodied,
strong-souled, strong-minded, if need
were, to the verge of masculinity, il
only thus could she become a distinct
human being and no parasite.
But as the years slipped by in the com.
mon-place disguise of days, he accepted