, he promptly replied
that he would marry them personally, if the parties would come to New
Orleans, or, if he should chance to be unavoidably engaged, then his
chaplain should perform the ceremony. Whereupon our hero and his
lady-love started for New Orleans; and being there united in holy
matrimony by the bishop, spent the happy month, so long deferred, in
festivities, and then returned home, supposing that their troubles were
now all at an end.

But this foreign marriage proved to be only the beginning of evil to
them. They had committed an unpardonable sin; they had defrauded the
priest of his fee, and had set a bad example, which others might follow
for the very economy of the thing.

Hardly had our newly-wedded pair found themselves located in their own
house, and finished receiving the usual round of congratulations, when
the wife was summoned to appear before the priest. She at once
complied, accompanied by her husband. The priest inquired why the
husband came, as he had not been sent for; he had only sent for the
wife. The husband gave him an Englishman's answer--that she was his
wife, and where she went, there it was his place to go. The priest's
reply to this opened the cause. The marriage was not lawful, and he
must detain her, and send her on to Puebla, and have her placed in a
convent. Such was the order he had received, and which he exhibited;
and the two soldiers at the door were stationed there to carry the
order into execution.

At this point in the affair the Englishman drew two arguments from
under his coat, and leveling one of them at the head of the padre,
suggested to him the propriety of not interposing any obstacle to the
return of himself and wife to their home. This was a poser; an act of
open impiety; a Kentucky argument. But there was no remedy. The
Inquisition was not now in authority; its instruments of torture had
been destroyed; its fires had been extinguished; and so the Englishman
got the best of the argument, and retired peaceably to his own home.

At his house the Englishman was waited upon by the Alcalde, who
informed him that he had been ordered to take the wife, and that he
dared not disobey. But he suggested a method by which the order might
be evaded. This was to send the wife every day, at a certain hour, into
a neighbor's house, and at that hour the officers would come and search
his dwelling, and would accordingly report "Not found." This farce
continued to be enacted da