iver her nation from Sisera. If there had
been a hammer and a nail in the room that night, I think I should have
been Jael--with this difference, that I should have done it to deliver
myself.

"With the morning this passed off, for the time. I went and spoke to a
lawyer.

"Most people, in my place, would have had enough of the law already. But
I was one of the sort who drain the cup to the dregs. What I said to him
was, in substance, this. 'I come to ask your advice about a madman. Mad
people, as I understand it, are people who have lost control over their
own minds. Sometimes this leads them to entertaining delusions; and
sometimes it leads them to committing actions hurtful to others or to
themselves. My husband has lost all control over his own craving for
strong drink. He requires to be kept from liquor, as other madmen
require to be kept from attempting their own lives, or the lives of
those about them. It's a frenzy beyond his own control, with _him_--just
as it's a frenzy beyond their own control, with _them._ There are
Asylums for mad people, all over the country, at the public disposal, on
certain conditions. If I fulfill those conditions, will the law deliver
me from the misery of being married to a madman, whose madness is
drink?'--'No,' says the lawyer. 'The law of England declines to consider
an incurable drunkard as a fit object for restraint, the law of England
leaves the husbands and wives of such people in a perfectly helpless
situation, to deal with their own misery as they best can.'

"I made my acknowledgments to the gentleman and left him. The last
chance was this chance--and this had failed me."

7.

"The thought that had once found its way into my mind already, now found
its way back again, and never altogether left me from that time forth.
No deliverance for me but in death--his death, or mine.

"I had it before me night and day; in chapel and out of chapel just the
same. I read the story of Jael and Sisera so often that the Bible got to
open of itself at that place.

"The laws of my country, which ought to have protected me as an honest
woman, left me helpless. In place of the laws I had no friend near to
open my heart to. I was shut up in myself. And I was married to that
man. Consider me as a human creature, and say, Was this not trying my
humanity very hardly?

"I wrote to good Mr. Bapchild. Not going into particulars; only telling
him I was beset by temptation, and begging him to c