``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 house,-- 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, and white linen
shirts. 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, in which he has Pope to back him.
``Come, Chips, cheer up like a 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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