CHAPTER IX.

Marrying two milliners.

Back in Vermont-fresh temptations-Margaret Bradley-wine and women-A
mock marriage in Troy-the false certificate-medicine and
millinery-Eliza Gurnsey-A spree at Saratoga-marrying another
milliner-again arrested or bigamy-in jail eleven months-A tedious
trial-found guilty-Appeal to supreme court-trying to break out of
jail-A governor’s promise-second trial-sentence to three years’
imprisonment.

From Troy I went, first to Newburyport, Mass., where I had some business, and where I remained a week, and then returned to Troy again.  Next I went to Bennington, Vt., to sell medicines and practice, and I found enough to occupy me there for full two months.  From Bennington to Rutland, selling medicines on the way, and at Rutland I intended to stay for some time.  My oldest son was there well established in the medical business, and I thought that both of us together might extend a wide practice and make a great deal of money.

No doubt we might have done so, if I had minded my medical business only, and had let matrimonial matters alone.  I had just got rid of a worthless woman in New Hampshire with a very narrow escape from State prison.  But, as my readers know by this time, all experience, even the bitterest, was utterly thrown away upon me; I seemed to get out of one scrape only to walk, with my eyes open, straight into another.

At the hotel where I went to board, there was temporarily staying a woman, about thirty-two years old, Margaret Bradly, by name, who kept a large millinery establishment in town.  I became acquainted with her, and she told me that she owned a house in the place, in which she and her mother lived; but her mother had gone away on a visit, and as she did not like to live alone she had come to the hotel to stay for a few days till her mother returned.  Margaret was a fascinating woman; she knew it, and it was my miserable fate to become intimate, altogether too intimate with this designing milliner.

I went to her store every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and she always had in her backroom, wine or something stronger to treat me with, and in the evening I saw her at the hotel.  When her mother came back, and Margaret opened her house again, I was a constant visitor.  I was once more caught; I was in love.