rly as severely as I had; the bulk of their blows fell upon
me, and I had the sorest body and the worst looking face I had ever
exhibited. I rested one day and then hurried on to New York. Of course,
I had no means of knowing the feelings or condition of the loved girl
from whom I had been so suddenly and so violently parted. I only learned
from an Easton man whom I knew and whom I met in the city, that "Sarah
Scheimer was sick"--that was all; the man said he did'nt know the family
very well, but he had heard that Miss Scheimer had been "out of her
head, if not downright crazy."

Crazy indeed! How mad and how miserable that poor girl was made by her
own family, I did not know till months afterward, and then I had the
terrible story from her own lips. It seems that when her father and his
gang returned from pursuing me, as they did a little way up the road
towards Belvidere, they found her almost frantic. They locked her up in
her room that night with no one to say so much as a kind word to her.
How she passed that night, after the scenes she had witnessed, and the
abuse with which her father and brothers had loaded her before they
thrust her into her prison, may be imagined. The next day she was
wrought up to a frenzy. Her parents pronounced her insane, and called in
a Dutch doctor who examined her and said she was "bewitched!" And this
is the remedy he proposed as a cure; he advised that she should be
soundly flogged, and the devil whipped out of her. Her family, intensely
angered at her for the trouble she had made them, or rather had caused
them to make for themselves, were only too glad to accept the advice.
The old man and two sons carried a sore bruise or two apiece they got
from me the night before, and seized the opportunity to pay them off
upon her. So they stripped her bare, and flogged her till her back was a
mass of welts and cuts, and then put her to bed. That bed she never left
for two months, and then came out the shadow of her former self. But the
Dutch doctor declared that the devil was whipped out of her, and that
she was entirely cured. A few months afterward the family had the best
of reasons for believing that they had whipped the devil into her,
instead of out of her.

After staying in New York a few days, I went to Dover, N.H., where I had
some acquaintances, and where I hoped to get into a medical practice,
which, with the help of my friends, I did very soon. I lived quietly in
that place all wi