I have known wives to walk through such an experience as this into a condition of abject slavery--to waste their affection without return, until they have become poor, and spiritless, and mean. I have known them to lose their will--to become the mere dependent mistresses of their husbands--to be creeping cravens in dwellings where it should be their privilege to move as radiant queens. I have known them thrown back upon themselves, until they have become bitter railers against their husbands--uncomfortable companions--openly and shamelessly flouting their affection. I do not know what to make of the perverseness which induces a man to repel the advances of a heart which worships him, and to become hard and tyrannical in the degree by which that heart seeks to express its affection for him. There are husbands who would take the declaration that they do not love their wives as an insult, yet who hold the woman who loves them in fear and restraint through their whole life. I know wives who move about their houses with a trembling regard to the moods and notions of their husbands--wives who have no more liberty than slaves, who never spend a cent of money without a feeling of guilt, and who never give an order about the house without the same doubt of their authority that they would have if they were only housekeepers, employed at a very economical salary. I can think of no proper punishment for such husbands except daily ducking in a horse-pond, until reformation. Yet these asses are so unconscious of their detestable habits of feeling and life, that, probably, not one of them who reads this will think that I mean him, but will wonder where I have lived to fall in with such outlandish people. The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman's heart. Why some graceful and most amiable women whom I know will persist in loving some men whom I also know, is more than I know. I will not call their love an exhibition of perverseness, though it looks like it; but that these men with these rich, sweet hearts in their hands, grow sour and snappish, and surly and tyrannical and exacting, is the most unaccountable thing in the world. If a pig will not allow himself to be driven, he will follow a man who offers him corn, and he will eat the corn, even though he puts his feet in the trough; but there are men--some of them of Christian professions--who take every tenderness their wives bring them, and every expression of affection, and every service, and every yearning sympathy, and trample them under feet without tasting them, and without a look of gratitude in their eyes. Hard, cold, thin-blooded, white-livered, contemptible curmudgeons--they think their wives weak and foolish, and themselves wise and dignified! I beg my readers to assist me in despising them. I do not feel adequate to the task of doing them justice.