The Man Who Stole A Meeting-House | Page 2

just what he
pleased, or a black snake charm a bird. Talk about women marrying

with their eyes open, under such circumstances! They don't marry with
their eyes open: they are put to sleep, in one sense, and a'n't more than
half responsible for what they do, if they are that. Then rises the
question that has puzzled wiser heads than any of ours here, and will
puzzle more yet, till society is different from what it is now--how much
a refined and sensitive woman is bound to suffer from a coarse and
disgusting master, legally called her husband, before she is entitled to
break off a bad bargain she scarce had a hand in making. I've sat here
to-night and heard about men getting goods under false pretences;
you've told some astonishing big stories, gentlemen, about rogues
stealing horses and sleighs; and I'm going to tell you about the man
who stole a meeting-house; but, when all is said, I guess it will be
found that more extraordinary thieving than all that often goes on under
our own eyes, and nobody takes any notice of it. There's such a thing,
gentlemen, as getting hearts under false pretences. There's such a thing
as a man's stealing a wife.
"I speak with feeling on this subject, for I had an opportunity of seeing
what Mrs. Jedwort had to put up with from a man no woman of her
stamp could do anything but detest. She was the patientest creature you
ever saw. She was even too patient. If I had been tied to such a cub, I
think I should have cultivated the beautiful and benignant qualities of a
wildcat; there would have been one good fight, and one of us would
have been living, and the other would have been dead, and that would
have been the end of it. But Mrs. Jedwort bore and bore untold miseries
and a large number of children. She had had nine of these, and three
were under the sod and six above it when Jedwort ran off with the
meeting-house in the way I am going on to tell you. There was Maria,
the oldest girl, a perfect picture of what her mother had been at
nineteen. Then there were the two boys, Dave and Dan, fine young
fellows, spite of their father. Then came Lottie, and Susie, and then
Willie, a little four-year-old.
"It was amazing to see what the mother would do to keep her family
looking decent with the little means she had. For Jedwort was the
tightest screw ever you saw. It was avarice that had spoiled him, and
came so near turning him into a beast. The boys used to say he grew so

bent looking in the dirt for pennies. That was true of his mind, if not of
his body. He was a poor man, and a pretty respectable man, when he
married his wife; but he had no sooner come into possession of a little
property than he grew crazy for more.
"There are a good many men in the world, that nobody looks upon as
monomaniacs, who are crazy in just that sort of way. They are all for
laying up money, depriving themselves of comforts, and their families
of the advantages of society and education, just to add a few dollars to
their hoard every year; and so they keep on till they die and leave it to
their children, who would be much better off if a little more had been
invested in the cultivation of their minds and manners, and less in
stocks and bonds.
"Jedwort was just one of that class of men, although perhaps he carried
the fault I speak of a little to excess. A dollar looked so big to him, and
he held it so close, that at last he couldn't see much of anything else. By
degrees he lost all regard for decency and his neighbor's opinions. His
children went barefoot, even after they got to be great boys and girls,
because he was too mean to buy them shoes. It was pitiful to see a nice,
interesting girl, like Maria, go about looking as she did, while her
father was piling his money into the bank. She wanted to go to school
and learn music, and be somebody; but he wouldn't keep a hired girl,
and so she was obliged to stay at home and do housework; and she
could no more have got a dollar out of him to pay for clothes and
tuition than you could squeeze sap out of a hoe-handle.
"The only way his wife could ever get anything new for the family was
by stealing butter from her own dairy, and selling it behind his back.
'You needn't say anything to Mr.