 flowers and vegetables.« For Mr. Glegg, having
retired from active business as a wool-stapler, for the purpose of enjoying
himself through the rest of his life, had found this last occupation so much
more severe than his business, that he had been driven into amateur hard labour
as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary
gardeners. The economising of a gardener's wages might perhaps have induced Mrs.
Glegg to wink at this folly, if it were possible for a healthy female mind even
to simulate respect for a husband's hobby. But it is well known that this
conjugal complacency belongs only to the weaker portion of the sex, who are
scarcely alive to the responsibilities of a wife as a constituted check on her
husband's pleasures, which are hardly ever of a rational or commendable kind.
    Mr. Glegg on his side, too, had a double source of mental occupation, which
gave every promise of being inexhaustible. On the one hand, he surprised himself
by his discoveries in natural history, finding that his piece of garden-ground
contained wonderful caterpillars, slugs, and insects, which, so far as he had
heard, had never before attracted human observation; and he noticed remarkable
coincidences between these zoological phenomena and the great events of that
time, - as, for example, that before the burning of York Minster there had been
mysterious serpentine marks on the leaves of the rose-trees, together with an
unusual prevalence of slugs, which he had been puzzled to know the meaning of,
until it flashed upon him with this melancholy conflagration. (Mr. Glegg had an
unusual amount of mental activity, which, when disengaged from the wool
business, naturally made itself a pathway in other directions.) And his second
subject of meditation was the »contrairiness« of the female mind, as typically
exhibited in Mrs. Glegg. That a creature made - in a genealogical sense - out of
a man's rib, and in this particular case maintained in the highest
respectability without any trouble of her own, should be normally in a state of
contradiction to the blandest propositions and even to the most accommodating
concessions, was a mystery in the scheme of things to which he had often in vain
sought a clue in the early chapters of Genesis. Mr. Glegg had chosen the eldest
Miss Dodson as a handsome embodiment of female prudence and thrift, and being
himself of a money-getting, money-keeping turn, had calculated on much conjugal
harmony. But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may easily
happen
