7 March 1857

FRESH FERN LEAVES.

Entered according Act of Congress in the year 1855, by ROBERT BONNER, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A MUCH-NEEDED KIND OF MINISTER'S WIFE;

OR, A HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE FOR SOME PARISH.

I once had a narrow escape from being a minister's wife. No wonder you laugh. Imagine a vestry-meeting called to decide upon the width of my bonnet-strings, or the proper altitude of the bow on that bonnet's side. Imagine my being called to an account for asking Mrs. A. to tea, without incuding the rest of the alphabet. Imagine my parishioners expecting me to attend a meeting of the Dorcas Society in the morning, the Tract Society in the afternoon, and the Foreign Mission Society in the evening, five days in the week—and make parish calls on the sixth—besides keeping the buttons on my husband's shirts, and taking care of my "nine children, and one at the breast." Imagaine a self-constituted committee of female Paul Pry's running their arms up to the elbows in my pickle-jar—rummaging my cupboards—cross-questioning my maid-of-all-work, and catechising my grocer for the price I paid for tea. Imagine my ministerial progeny prohibited chess and chequers by the united voice of the parish. Christopher!

Still, the world lost a great deal by my non-acceptance of that "call." What would I have done? I would not, on Saturday afternoon, (that holiday which should never, on any pretext, be wrested from our over-schooled, over-taught, children,) have put the finishing touch to the crook in their poor little spines, by drumming them all into a Juvenile Sewing Society, to stitch pinafores for the Kangaroo heathen. What would I have done? I would have ate, drunk, slept and laughed, like any other decent man's wife. I would have educated my children as do other men's wives, to suit myself, which would have been to turn them out to grass till they were seven years old, before which time no child, in my opinion, should ever see the inside of a school-room; and after that, given them study in homæpathic, and exercise in allopathic quantities. I would have taken the liberty, as do other men's wives, when family duties demanded it, to send word to morning callers that I "was engaged." I should have taken a walk on Sunday, if my health required it, without asking leave of the deacons of my parish. I would have gone into my husband's study, every Saturday night, and crossed out every line in his forethcoming sermon, after "sixthly." I would have encouraged a glorious beard on my husband's sacerdotal chin, not under the cowardly plea of a preventive to a possible bronchitis, but because a minister's wife has as much right to a good-looking husband, as a lay-woman. I would have invited all the children in my parish to drink tea with me once a week, to play hunt the slipper, and make molasses candy; and I would have made them each a rag-baby to look at, while their well-meaning, but infatuated Sunday-school teachers were bothering their brains with the doctrine of election. That's what I would have done.

FANNY FERN