sad-iron, has been at work upon the buttons.

For a year or two after our marriage, I used to express impatience,
whenever, in putting on a clean shirt, I found a button gone. Mrs.
Jones, bore this for a while without exhibiting much feeling. But it
fretted her more than she permitted any one to see. At length, the
constant recurrence of the evil--I didn't know as much then as I do
now--annoyed me so that I passed from ejaculatory expressions of
impatience into more decided and emphatic disapprobation, and to

"Psha!" and "there it is again!" and the like were added:

"I declare, Mrs. Jones, this is too bad!" or

"I've given up hoping for a shirt with a full complement of
buttons--" or

"If you can't sew the buttons on my shirt, Mrs. Jones, I will hire
some one to do it."

This last expression of displeasure I never ventured upon but once.
I have always felt ashamed of it since, whenever a recollection of
my unreasonableness and impatience in the early times of the shirt
button trouble has crossed my mind. My wife took it so much to
heart, and so earnestly avowed her constant solicitude in regard to
the shirt buttons, that I resolved from that time, to bear the evil
like a man, and instead of grumbling or complaining, make known the
fact of a deficiency whenever it occurred, as a good joke. And so
for a year or so it used to be when the buttons were missing: