Bill Nye and Boomerang: Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary GemsNye, Bill
General
Bill Nye and Boomerang: Or, The Tale of a Meek-Eyed Mule, and Some Other Literary Gems
Nye, Bill
American wit and humor
|Dr. Westwood lectured here on Wednesday evening on the Model Husband.
He wanted me to sit upon the stage as the horrible example, but I
declined. He was quite pointed in his remarks all the way through,
and seemed to have me in his mind when he described the model husband,
although of course he used a fictitious name. The lecture was a good
one, and very well liked by the husbands who had to sit and take it for
an hour and a half. Let the gentle male reader imagine himself sitting
for that length of time with his own wife on one side of him and another
man's wife on the other side of him, and when the speaker makes a point
on the old man to get alternate jabs in the side from the delighted
ladies.
I shall lecture here during the winter on the subject of the "Model
Wife." I will then get even. I will tell how the young man with bright
hopes, and thinking only of the great, consuming love he has for his
new spouse, is torn away from the hallowed ties of home and the sunny
influences of young companions, and buried in the poverty-stricken
cottage of a woman who cannot begin to support him in the style in which
he has been accustomed.
It is high time that this course of disgraceful misrepresentation on the
part of young women should be exposed. I once knew a young man with the
most gentle and trustful nature. He had never known care or sorrow. But
an adventuress with winsome smile and loving voice crossed his path and
allowed him to think that she could maintain a husband like other women,
and in his blind adoration for her he bade good-bye to his home and its
joys and madly walked out with her into the great, untried future. She
told him that he should never know the cruel sting of poverty, and other
romantic trash, and look at him to-day. He is a broken-hearted man. His
wife does not take him into society; does not keep him clothed as other
men are clothed, and grudgingly gives him the little pittance from week
to week which she earns by washing.
Is it strange that his pillow is wet with tears, and in his agony he
cries out upon the still air of night, "Oh, mother, why did I leave thy
kindly protection and overshadowing love and marry a total stranger?"
Then the woman who has sworn to protect and love and cherish him kicks
him in the pit of the stomach and harshly tells him to "dry up."
I sometimes think that if mothers knew to what sorrow and gross and
shameless treatment their sons were to submit all through their lives,
they would put them out of their misery with a base-ball club. Some
mothers do try this but they postpone it too long and the sons get too
large and more difficult to kill than when their skulls are young and
tender.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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