OLD MAIDS AND BACHELORS

Alden Times, November 1, 1878, page 7

 

Old maids are useful. They can cook, sew and take care of children, nurse sick people, and generally play the piano. Old bachelors are useless. They do not even know how to drive nails or split wood.

Old maids are amiable. If one wants anything done that requires patience and kindness of heart, a single lady is sure to be the one to do it.

Old bachelors are ill-natured. They desire to be as disobilging as possible. They snub children, despise babies and hat young mothers, and are always so busily employed in seeing that other people take good care of them that they hace not a moment to give anyone else.

Old maids are nice-looking, and "young for their years." Old bachelors generally have red noses, rheumatism in their knees, bald heads, and mouths that turn down at the corners.

Old maids can make a home of one little room, and cook delicious meals for one over the gas-jet in cunning, little tine kettles, besides making all their own wardrobe. Old bachelores need an army of tailors, waiters, cooks, distant relatives and hotel landlords to keep them comfortable. When old maids are ill, they tie up their heads in pocket-handkerchiefs, take homeopathic pellets out of two bottles, alternately, and got well again. When old bachelors are ill, they go to bed and send for four doctors; have a consultation; a mantelpiece full of black bottles,l all the amiable married men who belong to the club to sit up with them at night, beside a hired nurse; they telegraph to their relations and do their best to impress the world with the idea that they are dying.

When an old-maid travels, she takes a sandwich, a piece of pound-cake, a bottle of lemonade in a hand-basket, and lunches comfortably in the carriage. When an old bachelor travels, he orders a dinner in courses at the station, and raves because he has not time to eat it before "fifteen minutes for refreshments" are over."

Old maids drink weak tea, and it cures their headaches.

Old bachelors drink strong liquors, which give them headaches.

Old maids are modes; they think their youth is over and their beauty gone. If, after a while, some autumual love is given them, they take it as a sort of miracale and hope people will not laugh at them for "marrying so late in life."

Old bachelors believe that all women are in love witht hem, and that they must carefully guard themselves from traps laid to inveigle them into matrimony. They also fondly cherish the belief that should they eventually become married men the world expects them to exhibit great taste in women in their choice, and that the "other fellows" will laugh if their portion be not tender youth and beauty; also that when they marry many women will expire of jeaslousy.