“Whereas, Elizabeth Rogers of Portsmouth, in the County of Rockingham, and State aforesaid, hath petitioned the General Assembly for said State, setting forth that she was married to the said Robert Rogers about seventeen years ago; for the greater part of which time he had absented himself from and totally neglected to support and maintain her—­and had, in the most flagrant manner, in a variety of ways, violated the marriage contract—­but especially by infidelity to her Bed; For which reasons praying that a divorce from said Rogers, a vinculo matrimonii, might be granted.  The principal facts contained in said petition being made to appear, upon a full hearing thereof.  Therefore,

“Be it enacted by the Council and House of Representatives for said State in General Assembly convened, That the Bonds of Matrimony between the said Robert and Elizabeth be and hereby are dissolved.”—­[New Hampshire State Papers, vol. 8, p. 776.]

I may, perhaps, here venture the irrelevant remark that “women sometimes do strange things,” and cite the subsequent conduct of Mrs. Rogers in evidence of the declaration.  After her divorce she married Captain John Roach, master of an English vessel in the fur trade.  The tradition is that, having sailed from Quebec for London, he most unaccountably lost his reckoning and found himself in Portsmouth (New Hampshire) harbor.  Here for reasons satisfactory to himself, he sold the cargo on his own account and quit sea life.[A] After his marriage he lived with his wife and her son by the former marriage on the estate in Concord, previously mentioned as having been conveyed by Rogers to her father.  Captain Roach is said to have been most famous for his unholy expletives and his excessive potations.  The venerable Colonel William Kent, now living at Concord in his nineties, says that Captain Roach one day brought into the store where he was a clerk a friend who had offered to treat him and called for spirit.  Having drawn from a barrel the usual quantity of two drinks the clerk set the measure containing it upon the counter, expecting the contents to be poured into two tumblers, as was then the custom.  Without waiting for this division the thirsty Captain immediately seized the gill cup and drained it.  Then, gracefully returning it to the board, he courteously remarked to his astonished friend that when one gentleman asks another to take refreshment the guest should be helped first, and should there be found lacking a sufficiency for both, the host should call for more.

[Footnote A:  Bouton’s History of Concord, p. 351.]

Whether Mrs. Rogers gained by her exchange of husbands it would be hard to say.  That in 1812 she went willing from this to a land where “they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” it is easy to believe.[A]

[Footnote A:  Captain Roach died at Concord in May, 1811.]