Reade_Put_Yourself_in_His_Place.txt topic ['13', '324', '378', '393']
suffered, and, laying aside childish delays,
be married to him in the old church to-morrow, along with .
and ?
, then she trembled, and blushed, and hesitated; and faltered out,
"! all in a moment like that? what would your mother think of me?"
ran for his mother, and brought her into the room.
"," said he, " wants to know what you will think of her,
if she should lay aside humbug and marry me to-morrow?"
. replied, " shall say, here is a dear child, who has
seen what misery may spring from delay, and so now she will not
coquet with her own happiness, nor trifle with yours."
", no," said ; "only tell me you will forgive my folly, and
love me as your child."
. caught her in her arms, and, in that attitude,
gave her hand to , and whispered "."
day, at eleven o'clock, the two couples went to the old church,
and walked up the aisle to the altar. looked all around.
had effaced every trace of 's sacrilege from the building;
but not from the heart of her whose life he had saved on that very
spot.
stood at the altar, weeping at the recollections the place
revived, but they were tears of joy. parson of the parish, a
white-haired old man, the model of a pastor, married the two couples
according to the law of .
took his wife home, more majorum.
whirled his prize off to , and human felicity has
seldom equaled his and his bride's.
in the rapture of conjugal bliss, she did not forget duty and
filial affection. wrote a long and tender letter to her father,
telling him how it all happened, and hoping that she should soon be
settled, and then he would come and live with her and her adored
husband.
. was delighted with this letter, which, indeed, was one
gush of love and happiness. told what had taken place,
and counseled patience.
broke out into curses. made wonderful efforts for a man
in his condition; he got lawyers to prepare a petition to
; he had the register inspected, and found that the
had married two poor couples; he bribed them to join in his
petition, and inserted in it that, in consideration of this
marriage, he had settled a certain farm and buildings on his wife
for her separate use, and on her heirs forever.
petition was read in , and no objection taken. was
considered a matter of course.
, a few days afterward, one of the lawyers in the , primed
by a person whose name am not free to mention, recurred to the
subject, and said that, as regarded one of these couples, too
partial a statement had been laid before the ; he was credibly
informed that the parties had separated immediately after the
ceremony, and that the bride had since been married, according to
law, to a gentleman who possessed her affections, and had lived with
him ever since the said marriage.
this another lawyer got up, and said that "if that was so, the
petition must be abandoned. was humane, and would
protect an illegal marriage per se, but not an illegal marriage
competing with a legal one, that would be to tamper with the law of
, and, indeed, with morality; would compel a woman to
adultery in her own despite."
proved a knock-down blow; and the petition was dropped, as
respected and .
's farm was returned to him, and the settlement canceled.
sent to him with certain memoranda, and warned him to
keep quiet, or he would be indicted for felony.
groaned and submitted.
lives still to expiate his crimes.
write these lines, there still stands at one
disemboweled house, to mark that terrible flood: and even so, this
human survivor lives a wreck. " the waist an inert mass; above
it, a raging, impotent, despairing criminal." often prays for
death. he can pray for any thing let us hope he will one day
pray for penitence and life everlasting.
built a house in the suburbs leading to . is
a forge in the yard, in which the inventor perfects his inventions
with his own hand. is a wealthy man, and will be wealthier for
he lives prudently and is never idle.
. lives with him. is too happy with to bear
malice against her father.
is lovelier than ever, and blissfully happy in the husband she
adores, and two lovely children.
no longer calls life one disappointment: he has a loving
and prudent wife, and loves her as she deserves; his olive branches
are rising fast around him; and as sometimes happens to a benedict
of his age, who has lived soberly, he looks younger, feels younger,
talks younger, behaves younger than he did ten years before he
married. is quite unconscious that he has departed from his
favorite theories, in wedding a yeoman's daughter. the contrary,
he believes he has acted on a system, and crossed the breed so
judiciously as to attain greater physical perfection by means of a
herculean dam, yet retain that avitam fidem, or traditional loyalty,
which (to use his own words) "is born both in and , as
surely as a high-bred setter comes into the world with a nose for
game."
. has rewarded . 's patience and constancy.
have no children of their own, so they claim all the young
and , present and to come; and the doctor has bound both the
young women by a solemn vow to teach them, at an early age, the art
of putting themselves into his place, her place, their place.
has convinced these young mothers that the "great transmigratory
art," although it comes of itself only to a few superior minds, can
be taught to vast numbers; and he declares that, were it to be
taught as generally as reading and writing, that teaching alone
would quadruple the intelligence of mankind, and go far to double
its virtue.
time flies, and space contracts: the words and the deeds of
, are they not written in the ?
foggy night, the house of a non- fender-grinder was blown
up with gunpowder, and not the workman only--the mildest and most
inoffensive man ever talked with--but certain harmless women and
innocent children, who had done nothing to offend the , were
all but destroyed. same barbarous act had been committed more
than once before, and with more bloody results, but had led to no
large consequences--carebat quai vate sacro; but this time there
happened to be a vates in the place, to wit, an honest, intrepid
journalist, with a mind in advance of his age. came, he looked,
he spoke to the poor shaken creatures--one of them shaken for life,
and doomed now to start from sleep at every little sound till she
sleeps forever--and the blood in his heart boiled. felony was
publicly reprobated, and with horror, by the , which had,
nevertheless, hired the assassins; but this well-worn lie did not
impose on the vates, or chronicler ahead of his time. went round
to all the manufacturers, and asked them to speak out. durst
not, for their lives; but closed all doors, and then, with bated
breath, and all the mien of slaves well trodden down, hinted where
information might be had. the vates aforesaid--
yclept--went from scent to scent, till he dropped on a discontented
grinder, with fish-like eyes, who had been in "many a night job."
man agreed to split, on two conditions; he was to receive a sum
of money, and to be sent into another hemisphere, since his life
would not be worth a straw, if he told the truth about the in
this one. terms were accepted, and then he made some tremendous
revelations and, with these in his possession, wrote leader
upon leader, to prove that the must have been guilty of every
outrage that had taken place for years in the district; but
adroitly concealing that he had positive information.
replied incautiously, and got worsted before the public.
ablest men, if not writers, are unwise to fence writers.
received phonetic letters threatening his life: he
acknowledged them in his journal and invited the writers to call.
loaded a revolver and went on writing the leaders with a finger
on the trigger. ! , dear, no: the very center of
.
co-operated with him and collected further evidence, and
then communicated privately with a portion of the
press, and begged them to assist him to obtain a commission of
inquiry, in which case he pledged himself to prove that a whole
string of murders and outrages had been ordered and paid for by the
very which had publicly repudiated them in eloquent terms,
and been believed.
press took this up; two or three members of the of
, wild, eccentric men, who would not betray their country to
secure their re-election to some dirty borough, sided with outraged
law; and by these united efforts a was obtained.
sat, and, being conducted with rare skill and
determination, squeezed out of an incredible mass of perjury some
terrible truths, whose discovery drew eloquent leaders from the
journals; these filled simple men, who love their country, with a
hope that the of this nation would shake off its
lethargy, and take stringent measures to defend the liberty of the
subject against so cruel and cowardly a conspiracy, and to deprive
the workmen, in their differences with the masters, of an unfair and
sanguinary weapon, which the masters could use, but never have as
; and, by using which, the workmen do themselves no lasting good,
and, indeed, have driven whole trades and much capital out of the
oppressed districts, to their own great loss.
hope, though not extinct, is fainter now than it was.
seem going all the other way. honest, independent man, who did
honor to the senate, has lost his seat solely for not conniving at
these outrages, which the hypocrites, who have voted him out,
pretend to denounce. play is still rampant and triumphant.
victims were sympathized with for one short day, when they bared
their wounds to the ; but that sympathy has
deserted them; they are now hidden in holes and corners from their
oppressors, and have to go by false names, and are kept out of work;
for odisse quem loeseris is the fundamental maxim of their
oppressors. so the assassins: they flourish. have seen with
these eyes one savage murderer employed at high wages, while a man
he all but destroyed is refused work on all hands, and was separated
by dire poverty from another scarred victim, his wife, till
brought them together. , have seen a wholesale murderer
employed on the very machine he had been concerned in blowing up,
employed on it at the wages of three innoxious curates. find
this is the rule, not the exception. " punishment but for already
punished innocence; no safety but for triumphant crime."
is fast asleep in the matter--or it would long ago
have planted the district with a hundred thousand special
constables--and the globule of now prescribed to
, though excellent in certain respects, is null in others,
would, if passed into law, rather encourage the intimidation of one
man by twenty, and make him starve his family to save his skin--
cruel alternative--and would not seriously check the darker and more
bloody outrages, nor prevent their spreading from their present
populous centers all over the land. these things, have
drawn my pen against cowardly assassination and sordid tyranny;
have taken a few undeniable truths, out of many, and have labored to
make my readers realize those appalling facts of the day which most
men know, but not one in a thousand comprehends, and not one in a
hundred thousand , until --which, whatever you may
have been told to the contrary, is the highest, widest, noblest, and
greatest of all the arts--comes to his aid, studies, penetrates,
digests the hard facts of chronicles and blue-books, and makes their
dry bones live.