What a contrast does the courtship and married life of the blunt
and practical William Cobbett present to the aesthetical and
sentimental love of these highly refined Germans! Not less
honest, not less true, but, as some would think, comparatively
coarse and vulgar. When he first set eyes upon the girl that was
afterwards to become his wife, she was only thirteen years old,
and he was twenty-one--a sergeant-major in a foot regiment
stationed at St. John's in New Brunswick. He was passing the
door of her father's house one day in winter, and saw the girl
out in the snow, scrubbing a washing-tub. He said at once to
himself, "That's the girl for me." He made her acquaintance,
and resolved that she should be his wife so soon as he could
get discharged from the army.
On the eve of the girl's return to Woolwich with her father, who
was a sergeant-major in the artillery, Cobbett sent her a hundred
and fifty guineas which he had saved, in order that she might be
able to live without hard work until his return to England. The
girl departed, taking with her the money; and five years later
Cobbett obtained his discharge. On reaching London, he made haste
to call upon the sergeant-major's daughter. "I found," he says,
"my little girl a servant-of-all-work (and hard work it was), at
five pounds a year, in the house of a Captain Brisac; and, without
hardly saying a word about the matter, she put into my hands the
whole of my hundred and fifty guineas, unbroken.
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