The wife, then, the part of one's self which marriage gives us, affords us a gratification of these suppressed faculties. She is our finer self; and in her we appreciate and enjoy what is denied to us. I freely admit the truth of what women-reformers tell us, that it is the admiration of us men that stimulates the love of dress in women. It is a fact--I confess it with tears in my eyes--but it is the truth, that we are blindly enchanted by that play of fancy and poetry in their externals, which is forever denied to us; and that we look with our indulgent eyes even on what the French statesman calls their "_fureurs de toilette_." In fact, woman's finery never looks to another woman as it does to a man. It has to us a charm, a sacredness, that they cannot comprehend. Under my wife's instruction I became an expert guardian of these filmy treasures of the wardrobe, and knew how to fold and unfold, and bring her everything in its place, as she daily performed for me the charming work of making up her toilet. To be sure, my slowness and clumsiness brought me many brisk little lectures, but my good will and docility were so great that my small sovereign declared herself on the whole satisfied with my progress. There was a vapory collection apparently made up of bits and ends of rainbows, flosses of clouds, spangles of stars, butterflies and humming bird's wings, which she turned and tossed over daily, with her dainty fingers, selecting a bit here and a morsel there, which went to her hair, or her neck, or her girdle, with a wonderful appropriateness, and in a manner to me wholly incomprehensible; only the result was a new picture every day. This little, artless tableau was expensive neither of time nor money, and the result was a great deal of very honest pleasure to us both. It was her pride to be praised and admired first by me, and then by my mother, and aunt, and uncle Jacob, who turned her round and admired her, as if she had been some rare tropical flower. Now, do the very alarmingly rational women-reformers I speak of propose to forbid to women in the future all the use of clothes except that which is best adapted to purposes of work? Is the time at hand when the veil and orange flowers and satin slippers of the bride shall melt away into mist, and shall we behold at the altar the union of young parties, dressed alike in swallow-tailed coats and broadcloth pantaloons, with brass buttons?