"Ah!" said "Chips," "you don't know what it is to have a wife,
and"--
"Don't I?" said Sails; and then came, for the hundredth time, the
story of his coming ashore at New York, from the Constellation
frigate, after a cruise of four years round the Horn,- being paid off
with over five hundred dollars,- marrying, and taking a couple of
rooms in a four-story houses- furnishing the rooms, (with a particular
account of the furniture, including a dozen flag-bottomed chairs,
which he always dilated upon, whenever the subject of furniture was
alluded to,)- going off to sea again, leaving his wife half-pay, like
a fool,- coming home and finding her "off, like Bob's horse, with
nobody to pay the reckoning;" furniture gone,- flag-bottomed chairs
and all;- and with it, his "long togs," the half-pay, his beaver hat,
white linen shirts, and everything else. His wife he never saw, or
heard of, from that day to this, and never wished to. Then followed a
sweeping assertion, not much to the credit of the sex, if true, though
he has Pope to back him. "Come, Chips, cheer up like a man, and take
some hot man, and take some hot grub! Don't be made a fool of by
anything in petticoats! As for your wife, you'll never see her again;
she was 'up keeleg and off' before you were outside of Cape Cod.
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