matrimony. My first wife had so misused me that it was always in my
mind that some reparation was due me, and that I was fairly entitled
to a good helpmate. The ill-success of my efforts, hitherto, to
secure one, and my consequent sufferings were all lost upon
me--experience, bitter experience, had taught me nothing.

I had not been in the Scheimer family three months before I fell in
love with the daughter Sarah and she returned my passion. She
promised to marry me, but said there was no use in saying anything
to her parents about it; they would never consent on account of the
disparity in our ages, for I was then forty years old; but she would
marry me nevertheless, if we had to run away together. Meanwhile,
the old folks had seen enough of our intimacy to suspect that it
might lead to something yet closer, and one day Mr. Scheimer invited
me to leave his house and not to return. I asked for one last
interview with Sarah, which was accorded, and we then arranged a
plan by which she should meet me the next afternoon at four o'clock
at the Jersey ferry, a mile below the house, when we proposed to
quietly cross over to Belvidere and get married. I then took leave
of her and the family and went away.

The next day, at the appointed time, I was at the ferry--Sarah, as I
learned afterwards, left the house at a much earlier hour to "take a
walk" and while she was, foolishly I think, making a circuitous
route to reach the ferry, her father, who suspected that she
intended to run away, went to the ferryman and told him his
suspicions, directing him if Sarah came there by no means to permit
her to cross the river. Consequently when Sarah met me at the ferry,
the ferryman flatly refused to let either of us go over. He knew all
about it, he said, and it was "no go." I had two hundred dollars in