The deed is accomplished.
My wife has got a piano. It came on a
dray. Six men carried it into the parlor, and
it grunted awfully. It weighs a ton, and shines
like a mirror, and has carved Cupids climbing
up on its limbs. And such lungs–whew!
My wife has commenced to practice, and the
first time she touched the machine I thought
we were in the midst of a thunder-storm, and
the lightening had struck the crockery-chest.
The cat, with tail erect, took a bee-line for
a particular friend on the back fence.
The baby awoke, and the little fellow tried
his best to beat the instrument, but he couldn’t
do it. It beat him.
A teacher has been introduced into the
house. He says he is the last of Napoleon’s
grand army. He wears a huge mustache, looks
at me fiercely, smells of garlic, and goes by the
name of Count Runawaynevercomebackagain-
by.
He played an extract de opera, the other
night.Ý He ran his fingers through his hair
twice, then grinned, then cocked his eye up at
the ceiling, like a monkey looking for flies, and
then down came one of his fingers, and then I
heard a delightful sound, similar to that pro-
duced by a cockroach dancing on the tenor string
of a fiddle.
Down came another finger, and I was re-
minded of the wind whistling through the knot-
hole of a hen-coop. He touched his thumb,
and I though I was in an orchard, listening to
the distant braying of a jackass.
Now he ran his finger along the keys, and I
thought of a boy rattling a stick upon a store-
box or a picket fence.
All of a sudden he stopped, and I thought
something had happened.
Then he came down with both fists, and, oh,
Lord! such a noise was never heard before.
I thought that a hurricane had struck the house,
and the walls were caving in. I imagined I
was in the cellar, and a ton of coal was falling
about my head.
But I have to stand it all. The Snookeses
and the Smitherses and all the fashionable peo-
ple have pianos. And we must be fashionable
even if the baby becomes epileptic and the rest
of us go crazy.

Source: Girls of Today. December 18, 1875: 8.