e he was himself ready to do it, he asked Nancy to be his
wife; but he was too late. She had "given her word" to the poor fellow
whom she had lured back from Death's door.

The court was admonished to take cognizance of this fact, that, if Nancy
had married the man in whom her heart had been interested up to the time
when the stranger came, she would have married in her own sphere, a man
of her own rank, and would have loved him as he did her, with an equal
love; they would have lived out their lives, animating them with
skirmishes and small warfare, and winning victories over each other,
which would have proved disastrous as defeats to neither.

It would have been no high crime to such a man that Nancy was ignorant
up and down through the range of knowledge; he would not have turned
away in disgust from his endeavors to teach her, if she took it into her
head to learn, though she dropped and regained the ambition through
every winter of her life. He would have plodded on in his accustomed
ways, would have protected his wife and child from starvation and cold,
without imagining that a husband and father could retire from his
position as such, or abrogate his duties. No vague expectations in
regard to herself, no bitter disappointment in regard to him, would have
attended her. The very changes in her character, which had made her not
to be endured,--how far was he whose name she bore responsible for them?
She had been accustomed to thrift and labor, she saw in him idleness and
waste of power and life. She had exhausted the resources readiest to her
hand in vain, and had only then given up her expectation.

It was not be denied that it was humiliation and wrath to live with her;
but her husband had sought her,--she had not sought him! If he could
plead for himself the force and constraint of circumstances, should not
the same defence be set up for her? And what might not patience, and
better management, and gentler and more noble demeanor towards her, have
done for her? Was _he_ the same man he was when he went away from
Dalton? Was he the same man in Dalton that he had been in his youth? Was
it not out of the pit that he himself had been digged? It became evident
that the arguments for the defendant were producing a result in court.
The judge on his throne, as well as the grand-jury, listened to the
argument in favor of the woman. And at last the case was decided; for
the judge charged the jury, that, if it could be sho