HAPPY HUSBANDS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 150, 25 February 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

HAPPY HUSBANDS.

MAN IS WHAT WOMAN MAKES HIM. Tom Hood, tl;e pathetic humorist, when absent from home, gave his testimony to the truth of Rousseau's saying that "Man is what woman makes him.'' " I never was anything, dearest, till 1 knew you, and I have been a better, happier, and more prosperous man ever since. Whatever may befall, my wife shall have my acknowledgment of her tenderness, worth, and excellence."

Happy was the domestic life of Ben. jamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield. He married late in life a woman much his senior who brought him wealth, but to whom he was greatly attached. Once, as he was parting with Ivr at the entrance of the House of Commons, where he purposed making an important speech, the full force of the carriage door shut against her thumb. Though suffering greatly she bade hi ill a smiling adieu, in orde- that he might not be disconcerted, before driving to the surgeon to have her crushed thumb diessed.

Thackeray's tenderness to the poor insane wife whom he loved to the last is a well-known fact. The poet Longfellow, who. by a fearful catastrophe, lost the queenly woman whom he wooed through the pages of "Hyperion,'" maintained a domestic life as nearly perfect as falls to the lot of mortals. "During twenty years," wrote a friend, '■ following this event, he only waited for tile hour which came at last. Through all the grand pose of his being, through his meek but manly acceptance of all the events of life, this was the one prevailing truth —he was waiting for the end." The secret of the sustained power and energy of Gladstone, the "old man eloquent, lay in the fact that his domest'c relations were always delightful, and that Mrs. Gladstone was en tire'y devoted to his well-being. Always accompanying him even to tho hustings, ready to shield him from every exhausting intellectual life. And no man of true greatness but givcw grateful acknowledgment to such womanly influence whenever he has been its happy recipient.

Among such may be numbered the blind Postmaster-General who brought in Postal-orders, Mr. Fawectt. By an accident Mr. Fawcett became blind at the age of twenty-five, yet in the next twenty years he accomplished remarkable feats through the help of his wife. Miss Garrett, before their marriage a woman of rare capacity, became after that event his secretary, fellow-student, adviser, and other self.