The ways of the hour

by James Fenimore Cooper

“I did see a strange woman about the house for a week or two before the fire, but I never spoke to her. They tell me she was High Dutch.”

“Never mind what they tell you, Mr. Burton”—observed the judge—“testify only to what you know.”

“Did you see this strange woman at the fire, or after the fire?” continued Dunscomb.

“I can’t say that I did. I remember to have looked round for her, too; but I did not find her.”

“Was her absence spoken of in the crowd at the time?”

“Something was said about it; but we were too much taken up with the old couple to think a great deal of this stranger.”

This is an outline of Burton’s testimony; though the cross-examination was continued for more than an hour, and Williams had him again examined in chief. That intrepid practitioner contended that the defence had made Burton its own witness in all that related to the measurement of the skeletons; and that he had a right to a cross-examination. After all this contest, the only fact of any moment elicited from the witness related to the difference in stature between Goodwin and his wife, as has been stated already.

In the mean time, Timms ascertained that the last report set on foot by his own agents, at the suggestion of Mary Monson herself, was circulating freely; and, though it was directly opposed to the preceding rumour, which had found great favour with the gossips, this extravagant tale was most greedily swallowed. We conceive that those persons who are so constituted, morally, as to find pleasure in listening to the idle rumours that float about society, are objects of pity; their morbid desire to talk of the affairs of others being a disease that presses them down beneath the level they might otherwise occupy. With such persons, the probabilities go for nothing; and they are more inclined to give credit to a report that excites their interest, by running counter to all the known laws of human actions, than to give faith to its contradiction, when sustained by every reason that experience sustains. Thus was it on the present occasion. There was something so audacious in the rumour that Mary Monson belonged to a gang of rogues in town, and had been sent especially to rob the Goodwins, that vulgar curiosity found great delight in it; the individual who heard the report usually sending it on with additions of his own, that had their authority purely in the workings of a dull imagination. It is in that way that this great faculty of the mind is made to perform a double duty; which in the one case is as pure and ennobling, as in the other it is debasing and ignoble. The man of a rich imagination, he who is capable of throwing the charms of poetical feeling around the world in which we dwell, is commonly a man of truth. The high faculty which he possesses seems, in such cases, to be employed in ferreting out facts which, on proper occasions, he produces distinctly, manfully, and logically. On the other hand, there is a species of subordinate imagination that is utterly incapable of embellishing life with charms of any sort, and which delights in the false. This last is the imagination of the gossip. It obtains some modicum of fact, mixes it with large quantities of stupid fiction, delights in the idol it has thus fashioned out of its own head, and sends it abroad to find worshippers as dull, as vulgar-minded, and as uncharitable, as itself.

Timms grew frightened at the success of his client’s scheme, and felt the necessity of commencing the reaction at once, if the last were to have time in which to produce its effect. He had been warmly opposed to the project in the commencement, and had strenuously resisted its adoption; but Mary Monson would not listen to his objections. She even threatened to employ another, should he fail her. The conceit seemed to have taken a strong hold on her fancy; and all the wilfulness of her character had come in aid of this strange scheme. The thing was done; and it now remained to prevent its effecting the mischief it was so well adapted to produce.

All this time, the fair prisoner sat in perfectly composed silence, listening attentively to everything that was said, and occasionally taking a note. Timms ventured to suggest that it might be better were she to abstain from doing the last, as it gave her the air of knowing too much, and helped to deprive her of the interesting character of an unprotected female; but she turned a perfectly deaf ear to his admonitions, hints, and counsel. He was a safe adviser, nevertheless, in matters of this sort; but Mary Monson was not accustomed so much to follow the leadings of others, as to submit to her own impulses.