yet, till society is
different from what it is now--how much a refined and sensitive woman is
bound to suffer from a coarse and disgusting master, legally called her
husband, before she is entitled to break off a bad bargain she scarce
had a hand in making. I've sat here to-night and heard about men getting
goods under false pretences; you've told some astonishing big stories,
gentlemen, about rogues stealing horses and sleighs; and I'm going to
tell you about the man who stole a meeting-house; but, when all is said,
I guess it will be found that more extraordinary thieving than all that
often goes on under our own eyes, and nobody takes any notice of
it. There's such a thing, gentlemen, as getting hearts under false
pretences. There's such a thing as a man's stealing a wife.

"I speak with feeling on this subject, for I had an opportunity of
seeing what Mrs. Jedwort had to put up with from a man no woman of her
stamp could do anything but detest. She was the patientest creature you
ever saw. She was even too patient. If I had been tied to such a cub, I
think I should have cultivated the beautiful and benignant qualities
of a wildcat; there would have been one good fight, and one of us would
have been living, and the other would have been dead, and that would
have been the end of it. But Mrs. Jedwort bore and bore untold miseries
and a large number of children. She had had nine of these, and three
were under the sod and six above it when Jedwort ran off with the
meeting-house in the way I am going on to tell you. There was Maria, the
oldest girl, a perfect picture of what her mother had been at nineteen.
Then there were the two boys, Dave and Dan, fine young fellows, spite
of their father. Then came Lottie, and Susie, and then Willie, a little
four-year-old.

"It was amazing to see what the mother would do to keep her family
looking decent with the little means she had. For Jedwort was the
tightest screw ever you saw. It was avarice that had spoiled him, and
came so near turning him into a beast. The boys used to say he grew so
bent looking in the dirt for pennies. That was true of his mind, if not
of his body. He was a poor man, and a pretty respectable man, when he
married his wife; but he had no sooner come into possession of a little
property than he grew crazy for more.

"There are a good many men in the world, that nobody looks upon as
monomaniacs, who are crazy in just that sort of way. They are all for
layin