I then announced my intention of returning to Brattleboro to settle up my business in that place, and she declared she would go with me; I was sure to be lonesome; she might help me about my bills, and so on.  Strange as it may seem, her parents made no objection to her going, though I was to be absent a fortnight, and was not to be married till I came back.  So we went together, and I and my “cousin” put up at the hotel we had lately left.  For two weeks I was busy in making my final visits to my patients acquaintances, she generally going with me every day.

At the end of that time we went back to Keene, and in three weeks we were married in her father’s house, the old folks making a great wedding for us, which was attended by all the neighbors and friends of the family.  We stayed at home two weeks, and meanwhile arranged our plans for the future.  We proposed to go out to Ohio, where she had some relatives, and settle down.  She had seven hundred dollars in bank in Keene which she drew, and we started on our journey.  We went to Troy, where we stayed a few days, and during that time we both concluded that we would not go West, but return to Keene and live in the town instead of on the farm, so that I could open an office and practice there.

So we went back to her home again, but before I completed my plans for settling down in Keene, Mary and I had several quarrels which were worse than mere ordinary matrimonial squabbles.  Two or three young men in Keene, with whom I had become acquainted, twitted me with marrying Mary, and told me enough about her to convince me that her former life had not been altogether what it should have been.  I had been too blinded by her beauty when I first saw her in Brattleboro, to notice how extremely easily she was won.  Her parents, too, were wonderfully willing, if not eager, to marry her to me.  All these things came to me now, and we had some very lively conversations on the subject, in which the old folks joined, siding with their daughter of course.  By and by the girl went to Keene and made a complaint that she was afraid of her life, and I was brought before a magistrate and put under bonds of four hundred dollars to keep the peace.  I gave a man fifty dollars to go bail for me, and then, instead of going out to the farm with Mary, I went to the hotel in Keene.

The well-known character of the girl, my marriage to her, the brief honeymoon, the quarrels and the cause of the same, were all too tempting material not to be served up in a paragraph, and as I expected and feared, out came the whole story in the Keene paper.

This was copied in other journals, and presently came letters to the family and to other persons in the place, giving some account of my former adventures and marriages.  Of this however I knew nothing, till one day, while I was at the hotel, I was suddenly arrested for bigamy.  But I was used to this kind of arrest by this time, and I went before the magistrate with my mind made up that I must suffer again for my matrimonial monomania.