“Boys, I shall not buy the Corporal. I shall give every dollar in my pocket to Mrs. Smead an' throw in myself. It ain't much, but it may be more.”
That week he lettered a placard with great pains, and had it framed and hung in the “drawing-room,” and it said:
Proclamation of D. W. Smead:
In the name of God, amen. I hereby declare my wife to be a free woman and entitled to the rights of a human being in my home; the same right that I have to be wise or foolish. She shall have a part of the money that she earns by her own labor, and the right to rest when she is weary, and to enjoy a share of my abundant leisure. All persons are warned against harboring or trusting me any further at her expense.
CHAPTER V
THE physical as well as the mental and moral boundaries of the community of Griggsby, in northern New England, were fitted to inspire eloquence. The town lay between two mountain ranges crowned with primeval forests, and near the shore of a beautiful lake, with the Canadian line a little north of it. There lived among us a lawyer from the state of Maine who had sung of its “forests, lakes, and rivers, and the magnificent sinuosities of its coast,” but he had been silenced by Colonel Buckstone's “towering, cloud-capped, evergreen galleries above the silver floor of our noble lake.”
There were also our mental and moral boundaries; on the east, hard times and history; on the west, the horse-traders of York State, mingled with wild animals and backed by pathless woods; on the north, the Declaration of Independence; on the south, the Democratic party; while above was a very difficult heaven, and beneath a wide open and most accessible hell.
Our environment had some element that appealed to every imagination, and was emphasized by the solemn responsibilities of the time. Our ancient enemies in the South had begun to threaten the land under the leadership of Seymour and Blair. The oratory of New England was sorely taxed.