difficulty in proving the execution of the release, and was
compelled to introduce as a witness the constable who had
been employed to find the vagabond husband and obtain his
signature. His testimony disclosed the facts that he found
the husband in the forest in one of our north-eastern
counties, engaged in making shingles (presumably stealing
timber from the public lands and converting it into the
means of indulging his habits of drunkenness), and only five
dollars of the fifty mentioned in the release had in fact
been paid. The Court held, was compelled to hold, that the
party injured _in view of the law_, had received full
compensation for the wrong--and the mother and daughters
with no means of redress were left to starve. This was the
act of the _representative_ of the wife and daughters to
whom we are referred, as a better protector of their rights
than they themselves could be. It may properly be added,
that if the action had proceeded to judgment without
interference from the husband, and such amount of damages
had been recovered as a jury might have thought it proper to
award, the money would have belonged to the husband, and the
wife could not lawfully have touched a cent of it. Her
attorney might, and doubtless would have paid it to her, but
he could only have done so at the peril of being compelled
to pay it again to the drunken husband if he had demanded
it.

In another case, two ladies, mother and daughter, some time
prior to 1860 came from an eastern county of New York to
Rochester, where a habeas corpus was obtained for a child of
the daughter less than two years of age. It appeared on the
return of the writ, that the mother of the child had been
previously abandoned by her husband, who had gone to a
Western State to reside, and his wife had returned with the
child to her mother's house, and had resided there after her
desertion. The husband had recently returned from the West,
had succeeded in getting the child into his custody, and was
stopping overnight with it in Rochester on the way to his
Western home. No misconduct on the part of t