I find the following statement:  “It would be inexpedient to recapitulate the testimony in a transaction which was calculated to call up exasperated feelings, which has apparently taxed ingenuity and genius to criminate and recriminate, where a deep sense of injury is evidently felt and expressed by the parties to the controversy, and where this state of feeling has extended, as it was to be expected, to all the immediate friends of the parties, who from their situation were necessarily compelled to become witnesses and to testify in the case.”

In the relation of this story I shall substitute Christian names for the surnames of the parties outside of the Field family, although all have become public property and the principals are dead.  The scene is laid in the adjoining counties of Windham and Windsor in the Green Mountain State, and this is how it happened: 

There lived at Windsor, in the county of the same name, a widow named Susanna, and she was well-to-do according to the modest standard of the times.  She was blest with a goodly family of sons and daughters, among whom was Mary Almira, a maiden fair to look upon and impressionable withal.  Now it befell that Mary Almira, while still very young, was sent to school at the Academy in Leicester, Mass., where she met, and, in the language of the law, formed “a natural and virtuous attachment” with a student named Jeremiah, sent thither by his guardian from Oxbridge in the state last before mentioned.  They met, vowed eternal devotion and parted, as many school-children have done before and will do again.

After her return to Windsor, Jeremiah seemingly faded from the thoughts of Mary Almira, so that when she subsequently accompanied her mother on a visit to Montreal, she felt free to experience “a sincere and lively affection” for a Canadian youth named Elder.  So lively was this affection that when Jeremiah next saw Mary Almira it had completely effaced him from her memory.  Nothing daunted, however, being then of the mature age of eighteen years and eight months, and two years Mary’s senior, he resumed the siege of her heart, and in short order their engagement was duly “promulgated and even notorious.”

Before Mary succumbed to the second suit of Jeremiah, she waited for a pledge of affection from young Mister Elder in the shape of an album in which he was to have forwarded a communication, and it was “in the bitterness of her disappointment at not receiving a letter, message, or remembrance from Mister Elder that she formed the engagement with Jeremiah, in order that she might gratify her resentment by sending the news of the same to Mister Elder.”  This she did with a peremptory request for the return of her album without the leaves on which he had written.  What was her chagrin and unavailing remorse on receiving the album to find that every leaf was cut out but one, a mute witness to her “infidelity to her early lover.”  Small wonder that “her tenderness revived,” and “she cursed the hour in which she had formed the precipitate engagement with Jeremiah, and oftentimes she shed over that album tears of heartfelt sorrow and regret.”  At least so we are told in the pleadings, from which authentic source I draw my quotations.