Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures Part 26

"Mother, you see, knows all your little ways; and you wouldn't get another wife to study you and pet you up as I've done--a second wife never does; it isn't likely she should. And after all, we've been very happy. It hasn't been my fault if we've ever had a word or two, for you couldn't help now and then being aggravating; n.o.body can help their tempers always,--especially men. Still we've been very happy, haven't we, Caudle?

"Good-night. Yes,--this cold does tear me to pieces; but for all that, it isn't the shoes. G.o.d bless you, Caudle; no,--it's NOT the shoes. I won't say it's the key-hole; but again I say, it's not the shoes. G.o.d bless you once more--But never say it's the shoes."

The above significant sketch is a correct copy of a drawing from the hand of Caudle at the end of this Lecture. It can hardly, we think, be imagined that Mrs. Caudle, during her fatal illness, never mixed admonishment with soothing as before; but such fragmentary Lectures were, doubtless, considered by her disconsolate widower as having too touching, too solemn an import to be vulgarised by type. They were, however, printed on the heart of Caudle; for he never ceased to speak of the late partner of his bed as either "his sainted creature," or "that angel now in heaven."

POSTSCRIPT

Our duty of editorship is closed. We hope we have honestly fulfilled the task of selection from a large ma.s.s of papers. We could have presented to the female world a Lecture for Every Night in the year.

Yes,--three hundred and sixty-five separate Lectures! We trust, however, that we have done enough. And if we have armed weak woman with even one argument in her unequal contest with that imperious creature, man--if we have awarded to a s.e.x, as Mrs. Caudle herself was wont to declare, "put upon from the beginning," the slightest means of defence--if we have supplied a solitary text to meet any one of the manifold wrongs with which woman, in her household life, is continually pressed by her tyrannic taskmaster, man,--we feel that we have only paid back one grain, hardly one, of that mountain of more than gold it is our felicity to owe her.

During the progress of these Lectures, it has very often pained us, and that excessively, to hear from unthinking, inexperienced men-- bachelors of course--that every woman, no matter how divinely composed, has in her ichor-flowing veins one drop--"no bigger than a wren's eye"--of Caudle; that Eve herself may now and then have been guilty of a lecture, murmuring it balmily amongst the rose-leaves.

It may be so; still, be it our pride never to believe it. NEVER!

Footnotes:

{1} The author was just 42 when he began the "Caudle Lectures."