A DOMESTIC DRAMA.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3770, 26 March 1891, Page 3

A DOMESTIC DRAMA.

Poor Mrs. Goodwife, faithful, nervous soul! Was oft the victim of imagination, And though her thoughts she laboured to control, They filled her life with fear and agitation. | n She knew her fallibility, and yet When once a thought was weakened in her being, She could no peace of mind nor comfort get, Until its falsity was proved by seeing. And so she wondered, though she'd not oonfest— ■ 1 _ But when she once had thought it naught . could stop her— If her good husband toward the governess For ever acted in a manner proper. His love she'd test; so fn complete disguise She met him in the garden path at even, Oh, faithless wretch! Oh", horrible surprise! He stole a kiss as though 'twere often given. . In triumph, then, she tore the mask away. She never sines is in the garden roaming, Her husband doesn't know until this day His wife embraced the-gardener in the '' gloaming. WOMEN AND DOG TEAMS IN GERMANY. . ■ The labour of dogs is an important factor in the labour of Germany. It has been estimated that women arid dogs, harnessed together, do more hauling than the railways and all other modes of conveyance of goods united. Hundreds of small carts can be seen every day on all the roads leading to and from Dresden, each having a dog harnessed for the " near horse," while the "off horse" is a woman, with her left hand grasping the waggon tongue to give it direction, and the right hand passed through a loop in the rope which is attached to the axle, and crosses her shoulder thus harnessed, woman arid dog trudge along together, pulling miraculous loads in all sorts of weather. The vitality and indomitable endurance of the German race are most forcibly illustrated by these women workers, the descendants of the matrons who bore the soldiers who fought uader Arminius, and baffled, captured, and destroyed the Roman legions in the forests of Germany, and are themselves the mothers of the men who carried victory on their'bayonets from the fields of GraveMetz, and Sedan.

THE MISSING LETTER,

An old couple aire playing backgariimon . in a French chateau, in the evening of their lives—the lady silver-haired, though on her face are the relics of an incomparable beauty, and her companion courtier-like in every sense of ihe word. The game is interrupted by the arrival of a friend, who is apparently a stranger to both, and fails to recognise in either the least trace of prior knowledge or past companionship. The conversation among the old people tuins upon the advantages and disadvantages of matrimony, and the possibility of such a contradiction as constant man. The old lady, with playful courtesy, twits the stranger with the fact that he is still a bachelor, and bids him teU how it could have happened that, with all his chances and opportunities, he was proof against every seduction, and resisted the fatal influence of love. Whereupon, with a heavy sigh, the stranger bachelor takes up the parable, and asks pardon them with the prelude of 3 had loved—who had not ? and equally as a matter of course, she whom he loved was fickle like her sex and untrue to her promises. There had been an evening years ago. when only the one word required to be spoken ; friendship had ripened into a very sincere affection on both sides, as he was vain enough to imagine. One night at a ball he, full of love and buoved up with confidence, had presented the woman he bad hoped to marry with a ■Bbquet of yellow roses, in the heart of RS he had concealed a letter asking that fatal question put with so much anxiety, and attended with such natural doubt. This was to be the love-signal. If the bouquet was carried that evening it was to be taken as a sign of consent; if not, as a kindly token of rejection. The ball came, and the bouquet of yellow roses was not there, coldness gave rise to misunderstanding, cynicism changed into bitterness, and the L man who had been so ardent and hopeful r quitted the scene, never saw the lady any more, and tried to hide his disappointment in the activity and enterprise of life. inat was all my romance," laughed the unsusTMf.ting stranger, who could not account for asudden silence, or for the fact that flie silver-haired old lady without a word had left the' rqom. Eventually she returned taring in her hand an old dusty box. Sf she placed silently on the table Mid opened wth a silver key hanging at her vftdsti " A bouquet of yellow roses she mnrmnied to herself, and, looking for the first time amid: the shrivelled petals, she found a forgotten . letter as yellow as the flowers had been in their early vouth.And so they met after this long parting, and tha a>yst?ry was at last