What is a Wife? Well, that seems a question easily answered. But still the answer depends upon circumstances; in fact, there seem to be no end of replies to that little query, and answering the question, as one who has taken a little notice of wives in general, I'll tell you what a wife is sometimes. It is a something to be kicked and sworn at, and beaten, knocked down and trampled upon, used in brutal ways that the vilest barrow-man would hesitate about applying to his donkey for fear of killing it, while when the poor woman is forced to appear before a magistrate and prosecute, why--well, he is her husband after all, and for lack of evidence the brute gets off. A wife is something to have her hair dragged down and her head beaten against the wall; to be neglected, half-starved, or made to work for the noble specimen of creation who hulks about in front of public-houses, and scowls at every decent-looking working man who passes him. She is the something who sits up for him and puts his drunken highness to bed; nurses his children; slaves for him worse than any drudge--ten times--no a hundred times, for money would not buy a soul to slave as some women do for their husbands. What is a wife? Why, often and often a poor, trusting, simple-hearted woman, toiling in hard bondage till there's a place dug for her in one of the cemeteries and she goes to rest. But what is a wife? Is she not the God-given blessing to cheer a working man's home? and while working with her husband to make that home happy, is she not the sharer of his joys and sorrows,--the heart that he can trust and confide in, though all the world turn their backs upon him? Yes, this, and much more, _if her husband will_. And now a word for those who have dissension and discomfort at the cottage or lodgings, for it's hardly fair to disgrace that most holy of names by calling some places I know _home_. And first just a word about some of these miserable spots, and let's try and find a few causes for there being one-roomed places, badly furnished or not furnished at all, for the rickety chairs and beggarly bed and odds and ends are not worthy the name; children with no shoes, dirty clothes, dirty faces, dirtier hands, and dirtiest noses. The wife--oh, desecration of the sacred name!--a sour-faced, thinly-clad, mean-looking, untidy-haired, sorrowful woman, dividing her time between scolding the children and "rubbing out," not washing, some odds and ends of clothes in a brown pan--the wash-tub leaked, so it was split up and burned--and then hanging the rags upon strings stretched from one side of the room to the other, just as if put there on purpose to catch "the master's" hat and knock it off when he comes home from work.