e became very fond of
spirits and drank whisky with the Indians, but during his earlier years
he was most abstemious. It scarcely seems possible that his wife left
him because he was intemperate.

If one wishes to construct a reasonable hypothesis on a subject where
the facts are either wanting or conflicting, it is not impossible to
suggest a solution of this puzzle about Houston. Although his abandoned
wife never spoke of him and shut her lips tightly when she was
questioned about him, Houston, on his part, was not so taciturn. He
never consciously gave any direct clue to his matrimonial mystery; but
he never forgot this girl who was his bride and whom he seems always to
have loved. In what he said he never ceased to let a vein of
self-reproach run through his words.

I should choose this one paragraph as the most significant. It was
written immediately after they had parted:

Eliza stands acquitted by me. I have received her as a virtuous, chaste
wife, and as such I pray God I may ever regard her, and I trust I ever
shall. She was cold to me, and I thought she did not love me.

And again he said to an old and valued friend at about the same time:

"I can make no explanation. I exonerate the lady fully and do not
justify myself."

Miss Allen seems to have been a woman of the sensitive American type
which was so common in the early and the middle part of the last
century. Mrs. Trollope has described it for us with very little
exaggeration. Dickens has drawn it with a touch of malice, and yet not
without truth. Miss Martineau described it during her visit to this
country, and her account quite coincides with those of her two
contemporaries.

Indeed, American women of that time unconsciously described themselves
in a thousand different ways. They were, after all, only a less
striking type of the sentimental Englishwomen who read L. E. L. and the
earlier novels of Bulwer-Lytton. On both sides of the Atlantic there
was a reign of sentiment and a prevalence of what was then called
"delicacy." It was a die-away, unwholesome attitude toward life and was
morbid to the last degree.

In circles where these ideas prevailed, to eat a hearty dinner was
considered unwomanly. To talk of anything except some gilded "annual,"
or "book of beauty," or the gossip of the neighborhood was wholly to be
condemned. The typical girl of such a community was thin and slender
and given to a mild starvation, though she might eat quantitie