I and others really do not see any great reason to congratulate ourselves upon this new turn of events. The poor's advocate has evidently laid upon himself the additional burden, that all the time he is writing he has to keep watching and calculating,--superficially perhaps, but still, watching and calculating--the mean term, or middle-distance, between the long wick and the short. And what time has he left for his work? Some minutes after, when the snuffing came a little too soon, he asked, though somewhat doubtfully, "Dirty clothes for the wash already?" Next time, as she let it be almost too long before she snuffed, he looked at her interrogatively, and said, "Well? well?" "In one instant," said she. By-and-by, he having got rather more deeply absorbed than usual in his writing, and she in her work, he found, when he suddenly came to himself and looked, one of the longest spears in the candle that had yet appeared, and with two or three thieves round it to the bargain. "Oh, good Lord! 'Pon my soul, this is really the life of a dog!" cried he; and, seizing the snuffers in a fury, he snuffed the candle--out. This holiday pause of darkness afforded a capital opportunity for jumping up, flying into a passion, and pointing out to Lenette more in detail how it was that she plagued and tormented him, however admirably he might have arranged things; and, like all women, had neither rhyme nor reason in her ways of doing things, always snuffing either too close or not close enough. She, however, lighted the candle without saying a word, and he got into a greater rage than before, and demanded to be informed whether he had ever as yet asked anything of her but the merest trifles possible to conceive, and if anybody but his own wedded wife would have hesitated for a moment to attend to them. "Just answer me," he said. She did not answer him; she set the freshly-lighted candle on the table, and tears were in her eyes. It was the first time he had caused her a tear, since her marriage. In a moment, like a person magnetised, he saw and diagnosed all that was diseased and unhealthy in his system; and, on the spot, he cast out the old Adam, and shied him contemptuously away into a corner. This was an easy task for _him_; his heart was always so open to love and justice, that the moment these goddesses came into view, the tone of anger with which he had commenced a sentence would fall into gentle melody before he reached the end of it; he could stop his battle-axe in the middle of its stroke. So that a household peace was here concluded, the instruments thereof being one pair of moist eyes and one pair of bright kind ones; and a Westphalia treaty of peace accorded one candle to each party, with absolute freedom of snuffing.