At Templeton I speedily made known my profession, and soon had a very good medical practice which one or two “remarkable cures” materially increased.  I was doing well and making money.  I boarded in a respectable farmer’s family, and after living there about six months there came another most unhappy occurrence.  From the day, almost, when I began to board with this farmer there sprung up a strong attachment between myself and his youngest daughter which soon ripened into mutual love.  She rode about with me when I went to see my patients, who were getting to be numerous, and we were much in each other’s company.

On one occasion she accompanied me to Worcester where I had some patients.  We went to a public house where she and her family were well known, and when she was asked by the landlord how she happened to come there with the doctor, her prompt answer was: 

“Why, we are married; did’nt you know it?”

She refused even to go to the table without my attendance, and when I was out visiting some patients, she waited for her meals till I came back.  We stayed there but two days and returned together to Templeton.

A month afterward her brother was in Worcester, and stopped at this house.  The landlord, after some conversation about general matters, said: 

“So your sister is married to the Doctor?”

“I know nothing about it,” was the reply.

This led to a full and altogether too free disclosure to the astonished brother about the particulars of our visit to the same house a month before, and his sister’s representations that we were married.  The brother immediately started for home, and repeated the story, as it was told to him, to his father and the family.  Without seeing his daughter, the father at once procured a warrant, and had me arrested and brought before a justice on charge of seduction.  The trial was brief; the daughter herself swore positively, that though she had been imprudent and indiscreet in going to Worcester with me, no improper communication had ever, there or elsewhere, taken place between us.

Of course, there was nothing to do but to let me go and I was discharged.  But out of this affair came the worst that had yet fallen to my lot in life.  The story got into the papers, with particulars and names of the parties, and in this way the people at Worthington, who had chased me as far as Hancock and had there lost all trace of me, found out where I was.  If I had been aware of it, they might have looked elsewhere for me; but while I was felicitating myself upon my escape from the latest difficulty, down came an officer from Worthington with a warrant for my arrest.  This officer, the sheriff, was connected with the family into which I had married in Worthington, and with him came two or three more relatives, all bound, as they boasted, to “put me through.”  They were excessively irate against me and very much angered, especially that their race after me to Hancock had been fruitless.  I had fallen into the worst possible hands.