Mr. & Mrs. Price Marriage & Salvery I gambled on your love...

[Terrance]

...got a cheatin hand
I thought you'd be my king and I would be your queen
but you used me for your joker, cause I thought you're game was
clean....


I've on of those oversized coffee table books with beautiful photographs
of the line that separates the USA from Canada. A few of these photos
have husbands and wives on either side, and yup, even one with the line
right through the house, of course they could move it or the bed. 

Aslo, in the Quaker minutes and historical records you can find these
stories, but they are no joke. People really did have the lines re-drawn
right through their homes and it cause no small inconvenience, taxes and
property rights. Literally a legal tangle of lines. 

For women, like Mrs. Price, marriage was a risky business. Not unlike
being sold as an Swedish Axeman or an Irish indentured servant. Whatever
the odds may have been at any given time for any person or group,
marriage, like indentured service was a gamble. Seville contracts, when
signed in Europe, did not consider the worker much, so  those offering
themselves for service had little knowledge or control over who might
eventually buy those contracts.  If they survived the voyage to America,
they then had to go through a  period of acclimatization, and if they
were not brought down by diseases to which they had never been exposed,
then they had at least several years of hard work before they could
again call their lives their own. 

And those wives? 




            But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most
            valuable is economic security. Such security, of course, is
            seldom absolute, but usually merely relative: the best
            provider among husbands may die without enough life
            insurance, or run off with some preposterous light of love,
            or become an invalid or insane, or step over the intangible
and
            wavering line which separates business success from a prison
            cell. Again, a woman may be deceived: there are stray
            women who are credulous and sentimental, and stray men
            who are cunning. Yet again, a woman may make false
            deductions from evidence accurately before her, ineptly
            guessing that the clerk she marries today will be the head
            of the firm tomorrow, instead of merely the bookkeeper
            tomorrow. But on the whole it must be plain that a woman, in
            marrying, usually obtains for herself a reasonably secure
            position in that station of life to which she is accustomed.
            She seeks a husband, not sentimentally, but realistically;
she
            always gives thought to the economic situation; she seldom
            takes a chance if it is possible to avoid it.


http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/mencken/defense/Introduction.html

Now, 

Well, they're living in a happy harmony
Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
They're one day older and a dollar short
They've got a parade permit and a police escort
They're lying low and they're makin' hay
They seem determined to go all the way
They run a brick and tile company
Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee