them was too strong to be sacrificed even to
her outraged womanhood; and that she
might remain near them, and caress them,
and educate them, she bore her trials now
coming fast and thick upon her, with
forbearance, if not with silence.

But, matters came at last to a climax;
though sooner and on different grounds
than might have been expected. She
and her husband parted on a trivial question
of itself, but with grave results: a
mere dispute as to whether the children
should accompany their mother on a visit to
one of her brothers, who was avowedly
(very extraordinary that he should be
so, after the married life she had led!)
unfriendly to her husband. It was at last
decided that they should not go, and after a
bitter struggle. Far more was involved in
this question than appears on the surface;
her right to the management of her sons,
even in the most trifling matters, was the
real point of contention; the mother was
obliged to yield, and she went alone; the
children remaining at home with the father.
The day after she left, she received a message
from one of the servants to tell her that
something was wrong at home; for, the
children had been taken away, with all their
clothes and toys, no one knew where. In a
storm of terror and agony she gave herself
up to the trace, and at last found out their
hiding-place. But without any good result.
The woman who had received them, under
the sanction of the father, refused to
deliver them up to her, and met her prayers
and remonstrances with insults and
sarcasms. She was obliged to return,
widowed and childless, to her sister's home
in the country; like a wounded panther
tearing at the lance in his side, a fearful
mixture of love and beauty, and rage and
despair. It was well that she did return to
her sister's house instead of her own home,
for, her husband, enraged at her persistence
in visiting her brother against his consent,
ordered the servants to refuse her admittance
should she present herself, and " to open the
house door only with the chain across."

After balancing between reconciliation and
prosecution, a divorce suit was decided on by
her husband; expressly undertaken " because
his wife would not return to him." By this suit,
he attempted to prove that an old friend and
patron, to whom he owed his present position
and his former fortune, was the seducer
of his wife. But, the case broke down; and
the jury  without leaving their box, gave a
verdict in favour of the defendant: a gentleman
of known honour and established reputation.
The crowded court rang with cheers, such as
it had rarely echoed to before, as the verdict
was pronounced; friends in every degree of
life, old friends and friends hitherto strangers,
supported her with their warmest sympathy;
and if the readiness of the world in general
to be kindly honest, and to set right a proved
wrong, could have acted directly upon the
law, or could have essentially served her
without its aid, she would have had ample
redress. But it is the peculiar hardship of
such a case that no aid but the aid of the law
itself, remote and aloof, can give redress. The
feelings may be soothed, but the wrongs
remain.

And now began the most painful part of the
sad epic, whose initiatory hymns had glided
into a dirge: a dirge for ruined hopes and
wasted youth, for a heart made desolate, and
a home destroyed; a dirge for the shattered
household gods and the fleetings of the fond
visions of her heart.

The suit was ended, and the law had
pronounced the accused wife innocent. But the
law also pronounced the innocent mother
without a claim to her own children.
They were the father's property; absolutely
and entirely. He placed them with his
sister, a lady who shared his propensity for
corporeal punishment; and who flogged the
eldest child, a sensitive and delicate boy of
six years old, for receiving and reading a
letter from his mother. " To impress on his
memory," she said, "that he was not to
receive letters from her"! The yet younger
was stripped naked and chastised with a
riding-whip. Yet the law held back these
children from their mother's love, and
gave them to the charge of those who
thought their education fitly carried on
by such means. Time passed, and still
the quarrel and the separation continued.
By a small alteration in this same law
of ours—this idol made by our hands,
then deified and worshipped—she was
at length permitted to see her boys. But
only at stated times, and at certain hours,
and in the coldest manner. It was her
husband's privilege to deny her all
maternal intercourse with her sons, and he
stretched his privilege to the utmost.
No touch of pity dissolved the iron bars of
the law, and no breath of mercy warmed
the breast of the husband and master.
Against the decree of the law, what was the
protesting cry of nature? A hollow whistling
among the reeds of a sandy waste, which no
man heeded—which no voice answered.

Years trailed wearily on. Long years of
taming down her proud heart, laden almost
beyond its strength; long years of battle
with the wild sorrow of her childless life;
long years when the mother's soul stood
in the dark valley of death where no
light and no hope were. But the criminal
law swept on the beaten track, and no
one stopped to ask over whose heart
this great car of our Juggernaut passed.
The mother—she to whom GOD has
delegated the care of her young—she on whom
lie shame and dishonour if she neglect this
duty for any self-advantage whatsoever;
she,—a man's wife, and a man's lawful
chattel,—had no right to those who had