ould not be any possible appeal (although, sooth to say,
there _were_ a good many appeals, and quite effectual ones, from the
very unimportant decisions to which only his authority extended). And
when he came home at night, after dispensing justice for the whole day
(to wit--three hours on the average) she looked with almost holy
reverence on his broad brow, under which there must lie such a store of
legal knowledge, and thought what a blessed and honored woman she was to
have been allowed to mate with so much wisdom and so much dignity.

Does this sound like sneering at the wife's pride and devotion? If so,
let there be a word to qualify it. God knows that there are not too many
women who respect and look up to their husbands, and that the sanctity
and the happiness of the domestic circle would be much seldomer invaded
if there was more of this feeling. Only those poor women, on an average,
make such terrible mistakes as to the instances that should demand or
allow the full indulgence of this pride; and miserable humbugs are
looked up to and worshipped so much of the time, while those who could
deserve and should command that feeling are treated with indifference or
even despised by inferior minds to which they have been mated! They do
not "manage these things" any "better in France," probably; but they
manage them ill enough in republican America at about this period, and
the result is not a pleasant or even a moral one!

The check to any possible motherly concession to the weakness of Emily,
which Mrs. Owen experienced on this occasion, arose from the coming of
the ponderous man of law, whose heavy footstep and loud cough were at
that moment heard in the hall. Had the daughter been less absorbed than
she was in her own feelings, she too might have heard those tokens of
the Judge's presence; and had she been as wise as her mother, any
further discussion of the subject would have been stopped and the coming
catastrophe averted.

Either she did not observe or she was too much absorbed to heed who
heard her, for at the very moment when Judge Owen, a large-framed,
portly, broad-browed, iron-gray man of fifty, entered the back parlor
and stood full in the presence of his wife and daughter, the latter was
looking up to her mother with clasped hands and half sobbing out a
repetition of her former declaration: "I cannot--indeed I cannot marry
that man!"

"Hush! Emily, hush!--no more of this!" said the mother, half in hope