Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/158

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OHN quickly got the better of his grief, and seeing that neither his constitution, or the affairs of his family, could permit him to live in an unmarried state, he resolved to get him another wife; a cousin of his last wife's was proposed, but John would have no more of the breed: in short, he wedded a sober country gentlewoman, of a good family, and a plentiful fortune, the reverse of the other in her temper; not but that she loved money, for she was saving, and applied her fortune to pay John's clamorous debts, that the unfrugal methods of his last wife, and this ruinous lawsuit, had brought him into. One day, as she had got her husband in a good humour, she talked to him after the following manner : "My dear, since I have been your wife, I have observed great abuses and disorders in your family; your servants are mutinous and quarrelsome, and cheat you most abominably; your cook-maid is in a combination with your butcher, poulterer, and fishmonger: your butler purloins your liquor, and the brewer sells you hogwash; your baker cheats both in weight and in tale; even your milk-woman and your nursery-maid have a fellow-feeling; your tailor, instead of shreds, cabbages whole yards of cloth; besides, leaving " such