CHAPTER XX

.

JUDGE OWEN AND HIS DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE--TWO CRIMINALS AT THE BAR, WITH A SPECIAL EDICT FOLLOWING--A ROW AT WALLACK'S, AND ONE MORE RECOGNITION.

It has again been unavoidable, in following the fortunes of other characters connected with this narration, to lose sight of those who have prominently figured in the mansion of Judge Owen--the Judge himself, his wife, his daughter Emily, Aunt Martha, and the two lovers who fought over that very pretty little bone as if they had been dogs and she a tit-bit of very different description. But it is one of the first principles of conducting the successful march of an army, that no stragglers should be allowed to lag too far behind, lest a sudden onslaught upon them might cause a panic extending to all the other portions of the force. Let the Judge and his family, then, be kept up as nearly as possible to the march of the main body; and especially let not pretty Emily Owen and her mischievous printer-lover be lost from the ranks by any contingency.

Aunt Martha saw farther into futurity than her niece, when she decided that the row between Frank Wallace and Colonel John Boadley Bancker, if it came to the Judge's ears, would be likely to make affairs much worse instead of better; and Emily and she had some serious conversation over the prospect, that night of the street accident, after both the rivals had gone,--which did not tend to make the young girl go to her white pillow with the most blissful of anticipations. The younger lady thought it doubtful whether the matter need come to the knowledge of her father at all, as she did not believe that the Colonel would so far bemean himself as to make a complaint to the father of the young girl he was pursuing, of the advantages which another suitor might possess over him in the mind of the girl herself. Aunt Martha, who had seen somewhat more than her niece of the world and its meanness, did not consider the Colonel too proud to take such a course, if he believed himself likely to gain by it; and besides--she remembered, what her niece did not, that they were by no means alone in the house when the little affair occurred. Servants--those important personages, who in modern days keep the houses and permit their masters and mistresses, on the payment of a round sum per week, to live in the house with them--those ubiquitous personages, who seem to have the faculty of being precisely where they are not wanted, when any family trouble is to be ventilated,--servants were in the house at the time, and there was no guaranty whatever that they had not been sufficiently near to hear every awkward word that had been spoken.

The good Aunt felt that she had the more cause to be apprehensive in the latter direction, from some observations that she had accidentally made a few weeks before. Not long after the coming into the house of Miss Hetty, cook and kitchen girl, (she is certainly entitled to the prefix of "Miss," at least once, from the fact of her holding her head a little higher than any member of the family) a little after her advent, we say, Aunt Martha happened one evening to pass through the lower hall, in list slippers, and accidentally became aware that two persons were talking in a very low tone, just within the door of the dining-room. Perhaps it may have been accidentally, but possibly on purpose, that she took one glance through the crack of the door, herself unobserved, and noticed that the talkers were Judge Owen and Hetty. The tone was certainly confidential, and the two stood very near together. Had Mrs. Martha West not been aware of certain points in her brother's character which would make a criminal flirtation with a servant-girl in his own house impossible, she might have drawn the conclusion that some impropriety of that kind was on foot. As it was, she became satisfied that some of her previous suspicions were correct, and that Judge Owen, who habitually went to the intelligence-offices and selected the servants when any change became necessary, was capable of the ineffable meanness of bribing his domestics to play the spy on his own household and detail all the occurrences to him! Where the estimable man had picked up that

## particular meanness, she had no idea, nor is this a place in which to

hazard a suggestion. If it was so, it might be suggested that the practice of hearing and allowing weight to spy testimony, caught through key-holes and the cracks of doors, or picked up by lounging at people's elbows on sidewalks and in bar-rooms, had possibly some connection with the application of the same system to his own household.

Perhaps there may be persons upright and straight-forward enough themselves, and unsuspicious enough of the vices and meannesses of others, to doubt whether such things as those just hinted at, exist in the great city. To such it might not be amiss to say, that there are operations of this character, in what is called "respectable society," so much worse than the mere procured espionage of servants, that they make that atrocity almost endurable. Fancy the husband of a second wife keeping his eldest daughter by a former marriage, herself a married woman, in the same house with his wife, with orders to keep that wife constantly in view, to watch her when she receives company, dog her when she goes out, and dole out to her the necessaries for the family from closets, chests and cupboards of which she [the daughter] keeps the keys! Fancy these things, and the wife submitting to them, perforce! And then understand, what is the humiliating truth, that the lady subjected to these practices is a most beautiful and accomplished favorite, delighting thousands by her public appearances, envied by all, and supposed to be rolling in wealth and revelling in comfort!

Not long ago there was a story going the rounds of the press, of some spicy sporting operations in England, in which one trainer and jockey threw one of his creatures, in the disguise of a stable-boy, into the stables of another, to watch the appearance and action of his horses, to overhear what he could of the conversation of the trainer, to discover for what cups and matches they were about to be entered, and to make weekly reports to him, through letters pretendedly addressed to the boy's "mother," so that he could take advantage of the knowledge so unfairly attained, in making up his betting-book. By a mere accident the trainer discovered what kind of an emissary of the enemy was quartered in his stables, and instead of kicking him out he merely _gave him plenty to report_. He managed to have the boy overhear all sorts of manufactured conversations, rode his horses unfairly on the training-course, stuffed him with false reports of the matches for which they were entered, and, in short, gave him such budgets to send home to his master, that the latter grew completely mystified, bet on the losing chances instead of the winning ones, and lost about twenty thousand pounds, which went into the pocket of the intended victim. The story is a good one, and for the honor of humanity ought to be true.

Not many years ago a jealous old husband in this city, who had fallen into the misfortune of a young and handsome wife, grew jealous of her without the least cause, and descended to the execrable meanness of putting one of the chamber-maids under pay to play the detective and report to him what letters her mistress received and all the "goings on" in the house. Biddy was not quite keen enough for her new position, and the bright eyes of the young wife were not long in discovering that she was watched and dogged! What did the outraged wife? Send the vixen packing, bag and baggage, with a boxed ear for a parting present, as she might have done with all propriety? Not at all--she retained her and kept her own discovery a secret, merely adopting the same plan as our friend the trainer, and giving her _something to tell_. The wife fortunately had half a dozen male cousins, living at a distance, and as many female friends, living near. Between these two corps of assistants she managed to receive such letters, accidentally dropped for the servant-girl to finger, and received such clandestine visits when her husband was absent and at suspicious hours, as left no doubt whatever in the mind of a _reasonable_ man like the husband, that she must be terribly false to her marital vows. The catastrophe of all this need not be given: it was final enough, in all conscience, and sent the husband down town one day with a dim consciousness that he had made himself the greatest fool since Adam, and that an early burial would not be so great a calamity after all!

Unfortunately Judge Owen, of this writing, had no such sharp-witted and reckless opponent, and his meanness was left to work itself out in a natural manner. Aunt Martha's apprehensions were not idle, as was proved very soon after. The Judge and his wife returned from their little trip up the Hudson, on the second day after their departure; and within three hours after their arrival, before the Judge had been absent from the house a moment and before Colonel Boadley Bancker could by any means have managed to see him, the storm of paternal wrath and indignation burst on the devoted heads for which it was intended.

The gas had just been lighted on the floor below, and Aunt Martha and Emily were seated enjoying the summer twilight in the front-room of the latter, up-stairs, when the stentorian voice of the Judge was heard bawling from the hall:

"Martha--Emily--come down here a moment!"

"There it is! there is trouble ahead! I knew it!" said Aunt Martha.

"He _cannot_ have heard anything about it, yet," said the niece.

"He _has_, I am sure of it!" answered the Aunt. "We may as well go down and take the thunder-storm, at once, as have it hanging over us for a month."

"Oh, Aunt, I cannot endure to have Papa scold, when he is in one of his terrible humors," said the frightened girl. "I have done nothing, that I know of; but you don't know what rough words he says to me sometimes, and I have been almost afraid that he would strike me with that heavy hand! I believe I should _die_ if he did."

"No, child, you would not _die_, I think," said the more practical Aunt, "but something might occur for which your father would one day be quite as sorry--your last particle of love and respect for him might die, and that would be sadder than the death of many bodies. But come, Emily; we shall be called again in a moment."

Aunt and niece descended the stairs to the parlor, the latter trembling like a leaf in the wind and the former in a strange flutter that was part trepidation and part indignation. They found affairs in the parlor in a very promising condition, as the aunt had suspected. Judge Owen was too angry to sit in his large chair, as he would have liked to do, and receive the culprits with judicial dignity. He was walking the floor, with his hands behind his back and every indication of very stormy weather on his countenance. He looked bigger and more burly than ever, and less than ever like what the brother and father should have been, to the two who entered. Mrs. Owen sat in a rocking-chair, swaying backward and forward, with her hand to her eyes and very much the appearance of a whipped child who had been set down in that chair with orders to be "good." It was not supposable that the Judge had been whipping her, physically; but he had unquestionably been "getting his hand in" for the exercise that was to come, by reading her a severe lecture upon everything that she had done and everything she had _not_ done, since the day they were married.

"So then!" he broke out, the moment the culprits appeared in view. "This is the kind of order you keep in my house--_my_ house!" and he emphasized the possessive pronoun so severely that the poor little word must have had a hard time of it among his strong front teeth.

Emily, as yet, replied nothing. But Aunt Martha said:

"Well really, brother, I do not see that the house is in very bad order! Perhaps that rocker is a little out of place, and the _etagere_--"

"D--n it, woman, I am not talking of the furniture, and you know it!" thundered the Judge.

"William Owen!" said Aunt Martha, who had not gone through fifty or a hundred such conflicts without deriving some controversial profit from them--"I do not choose to be sworn at, in _your_ house or the house of any other man. If you were a gentleman, you would not be guilty of the outrage."

Emily trembled. Here was Jupiter plucked by the beard, and called hard names to his face, by one of the mere underlings of his dominions! William Owen not a gentleman! _Judge_ Owen not a gentleman! Could human presumption go farther? What would be the end of this?

"I will swear as I like, and when I like!" said the Judge, after a pause of an instant. But he did not swear again immediately, and not at all again at his sister, during the whole interview, it was noticeable. Brutality is not best met by brutality; but it is a mistake to suppose that it is best met by abject submission. What it needs, as its master and corrective, is _dignified firmness_.

"So this is the way, is it," the Judge went on. "The moment my back is turned, my house is full of low characters, and quarrelling and fighting become the order of the day."

"When did all this occur?" asked Aunt Martha, innocently.

"The very evening I left!" thundered the Judge.

"And how have you found it all out, so soon?" queried his sister, looking him very calmly in the eyes.

It may be a libel, for which an action would lie, to say that Judge Owen blushed at this home-thrust. He certainly reddened, but that may have been with anger--not shame.

"How do I know it? What business is that of yours, woman? It is enough to say that I _do_ know it, and that I will break all that sort of thing up, or I will break half a dozen heads!" This was a favorite simile of the Judge's, because it brought in the word "break" twice, in such an effective manner. "Well, Miss Emily Owen, what have you to say to all this?" It may be libel, again, to say that the Judge was sheering off his vessel from a battery that worried him, to engage one that seemed comparatively helpless; but really the whole thing bore that appearance.

"I, father? I have nothing to say," returned the daughter, "and for that reason I have not said anything."

"You do not deny, then," thundered the Judge, his voice rising higher because he had a younger, lower-voiced and less formidable antagonist, "that on the very night I went away there was low company in this house, and that--"

Perhaps Emily Owen had never presumed to interrupt her father half a dozen times during her life, but we have before seen that she _could_ do so, even wickedly, when fully aroused, and the temptation to do so in the present instance was overpowering. Besides, she had just caught a lesson from her aunt, in the "_womanly_ art of self-defence," the muscular development for which lies in the tongue.

"Do you call Colonel Bancker low company, father?"

"Colonel Bancker? No, girl! Colonel Bancker is a gentleman and a soldier," replied the Judge. "I am speaking of that low, contemptible scoundrel, Wallace."

"And _he_ has been in the habit of coming here with your consent, papa," answered the daughter, "and so I do not know how we were to blame for receiving the visits of people when you were gone, whom you were in the habit of receiving when you were at home."

"Hush, child! Hush, Emily!" Mrs. Owen felt it necessary to say at this moment. She had not before spoken a word, but she may have felt that that incarnation of reason and dignity, her husband, was "taking damage" at the hands of very ordinary mortals. "Hush, child--do not bandy words with your father."

"No, miss, do not bandy words with _me_!" roared the Judge, put exactly upon the right track, from which he had before strayed a little, by the words of his wife. "_I_ am master in this house, as I mean to let you know!" Humble Judge!--he _had_ let them know it, long before, quite as much as lay in his power. "I will not allow myself to be run over in this manner, any longer!" Ponderous and self-sacrificing Judge!--apart from the fact that no one in that house had ever tried the experiment, what a vehicle it would have been that could "run over" that man without danger from the encounter! And now gathering strength and force as well as anger, as he rolled down the mountain of denunciation, he went on: "I have called you down, both of you, and you especially, Emily, to make a final settlement with you! I have told you before that you should marry Colonel John Boadley Bancker, and I need not tell you again, for by G--you _shall_! And now I tell you something more. If you ever permit that d--d low-lived, miserable, contemptible puppy, whom you call Frank Wallace, to cross the door-step of this house again, I will break every bone in his infernal carcase; and when he goes into the street, you go with him! Do you hear?"

"Yes, father, I hear," said his daughter.

"Yes, we both hear, as I suppose you intended it for both of us," said his sister.

"I intended it for _everybody_!" roared the Judge. "Now let us see whether you obey or not! Come, Mrs. Owen, is supper ready?"

Probably the Judge supposed that he had supplied both the others with quite as much supper as they needed, as he did not extend the invitation to either. He certainly had done so: they were both "full," in one sense of the word if not in the other. His daughter was "full" of trouble and anxiety; and Aunt Martha was "full" of a more dangerous feeling--outraged pride and indignation.

"Poor Frank!--he cannot come to the house any more!" said the young girl, when they had left the parlor. "What shall I do? Aunt--Aunt--don't scold me, but I _love him_. That is the truth; and don't _you_ scold me, but help me if you can."

"Until this hour, Emily," said the aunt, gravely, and taking the hand of her niece kindly in her own, "I had simply been determined that you should not be forced into a marriage with Colonel Bancker, if I could prevent it. Within this half hour I have made up my mind to go farther. I know that you love Frank Wallace; I believe him to be a good man, and I know him to be a brave one; and now you shall marry him, if any aid _I_ can offer will help you to that end!"

"Aunt! Aunt! dear, good, kind Aunt!" cried the young girl, throwing herself into the widow's arms and giving her such a hug and such a storm of kisses as would have made Frank Wallace whistle "Hail Columbia" and "Abraham's Daughter" for forty-eight hours in succession.

Such was the radical effect, towards carrying out his determination in regard to each of the two rivals, produced by Judge Owen's ultimatum. He was not the first man, and he probably will not be the last, to pour the drop too much into the bucket of endurance and add that last feather to the load which weighs down the camel of patience. Something more of the "effect" will be seen in this immediate connection.

Judge Owen had occasion to attend a political caucus, at one of the down-town hotels, early in the evening of the second day from that on which the collision with his sister and daughter had occurred; and he consequently did not go home to dinner when his court adjourned. He dined at the hotel where the caucus took place, and afterwards strolled up Broadway, airing his portly figure, and intending to take the Third-Avenue cars at Astor Place or Fourteenth Street. When he came opposite Wallack's Theatre, at about nine o'clock, the lights shone brightly before the door, the placards announcing the "Returned Volunteer" and "Mischievous Annie" looked tempting, and as Judge Owen had an eye for the drama and was officially marked "D.H." on the book at the gate, he concluded to see the balance of the performance.

He passed in. Florence was just indulging in that terrible war-dance of jealousy which follows the supposed discovery of the fact that the wife of Bill Williams has taken up with a Picaninny, and the laughter and applause were uproarious. The Judge found some acquaintances in the lobby, and chatted with them while he watched the piece and while waiting for the next.

Finally another friend, a family acquaintance, came up the aisle, from the orchestra-seats, probably on his way to those pleasant lower regions in which refreshment to the inner man is dispensed. As he shook hands with the Judge, he said:

"Ah, Judge, I did not know that you were here. I saw your daughter, just now, down in the orchestra, but I am sure she did not come in with you."

"My daughter!" said the Judge, surprised, "I think you must be mistaken. Mrs. Owen did not speak of coming to the theatre this evening."

"Oh," said the acquaintance, "Mrs. Owen is not here. I should have seen her if she had been. Your daughter came in with a young man, and they are sitting together down there in the second row from the front."

"You do not know the young man?" asked the Judge, on whom the compound noun for some cause produced an unpleasant effect.

"No," answered the acquaintance, "I do not know him. He is a rather good-looking young fellow, short, with brown curly hair, and a moustache, and dressed in light-gray. No doubt you know him by the description."

Judge Owen _did_ know him by the description, but too well! That short good-looking young man with the curly hair, the moustache and the light-gray clothes, was as certainly the man he had forbidden his house and the company of his daughter, as his own name was Owen and his dignity a judicial one!

Here was an outrage!--witness it ye fathers whose daughters do not always obey your high behests. Here was a call for the exercise of the highest qualities of authority!--bear witness to that, all you good people who have at one time or another dragged your wives out of churches because you did not like the ritual, or who have dragged them _into_ churches because suitors armed with money-bags or aristocratic names or political influence, stood within and beckoned! Here was a necessity for proving what Judge Owen had only a day or two before so loudly asserted--his ascendency in his own household. Here was an opportunity to show to the public that Judge Owen, arbiter of the legal destinies of his fellow-men when they did not range beyond a certain insignificant number of dollars, was at once a Solon and a Draco in his own domestic relations. Great men _will_ develope themselves at some period or other in their lives, however they may previously have been kept back by adverse circumstances; and Judge Owen had never yet enjoyed the opportunity of showing half his mighty energies. Armed with the double power of a parent and the law, he felt that he could combat anything--even a young and delicate woman: gifted with a rigid sense of right which rose above all personal considerations, he felt that to that right he could sacrifice anything--even the privacy and sanctity of his domestic relations.

The great men of old had done something in that way: Brutus had laid his son, without a tear or a groan, on the altar of his country; Virginius had slain his daughter when her perilled honor demanded that violent deed; and only half a century before his own time, Napoleon had given up a beloved Empress and married a royal nobody, for the sake of preserving the dynasty that his people so demanded. It only remained for William Owen, Judge, to emulate those great examples and drag his daughter out of the theatre!

It may have been that Judge Owen did not think of quite all those great examples, as he walked broadly and pompously down the aisle, disturbing the audience just when the curtain was rising on the second piece; but he certainly bore himself as if he remembered all of them and a few hundreds more. Anxious spectators looked at him as he came down, speculating painfully whether he was likely to take his seat in front of _them_, and calculating what would be their chances of seeing in that event. But the Judge was not going to sit down--no! At the gate he encountered a momentary obstruction, in the shape of the usher who looked after the orchestra tickets; but he swept him away as a spring freshet might carry away a bundle of obstructing sedge, by a majestic wave of the hand and the information that he was merely going down there for a moment on business.

Then he strode on down the aisle, unobserved as yet by the lovers, who sat in the seat next the front and within three or four places of the end of the row, enjoying the dramatic entertainment and each others' company about equally. Perhaps they sat a very little closer together than they might have done had there been no parental objection in the way; and under the folds of Emily's dark mantilla, which lay upon her lap, there may have been two hands clasped together. Let the young and the loving, whose province it is to make such follies half the material of their lives, decide whether affairs were likely to be exactly in the shape suggested,--as also, whether at any time during the evening, when it had become necessary for Frank Wallace to make a remark to his companion, he had or had not leaned down his lips so close to her ear as almost to kiss its pink pendant.

The first intimation had by the absorbed lovers that the paternal bomb was bursting in the neighborhood, was conveyed by the Judge halting at the end of their row, leaning over the two or three people between, without any apology, stretching out his arm, and saying in his loud, coarse voice:

"Miss Emily Owen, you are wanted at home."

The blood flew to the face of the young girl in an instant, though it was the blood of anxiety and not of shame, and she asked:

"Is any one ill--hurt?--My mother--"

"Your mother is well, and there is no one sick at home," said the Judge, determined that his lesson to his daughter should not be balked by any one of the audience thinking him less a brute than he was. "But I find you here in improper company and against my orders; and I command you to leave that man and come home with me instantly."

Decided sensation in the orchestra-seats, and even on the stage, where Mrs. Florence paused in the middle of one of her most effective Yankeeisms, to know what caused the interruption. Sensation in a good many fingers, that they would like to be applied violently to the ears of the man who could speak in that manner to so sweet-looking a girl, no matter under what provocation. A few hisses and cries of "Hush-h-h!" "Hush-h-h!" Poor Emily had sunk back in her chair, the moment her anxiety was relieved by mortification, merely saying in a pleading voice, as if to disarm her tyrant:

"Oh, father!"

Frank Wallace, meanwhile, had sprung to his feet, the moment the opprobrious epithet was applied to him; and though he distinctly saw that the intruder was the puissant Judge Owen, Emily's father, and large enough, physically, to eat him for lunch--he was on the point of springing across the intervening space and giving him a taste of his gymnastic quality. This would have been terribly improper, no doubt, towards a man much older than himself, and the father of the girl he yet hoped one day to make his wife; but the spectators, had he done so, and could they have known all the facts of the case, would have been much more likely to forgive him than the miserable hound (now a miserable secessionist--thank Heaven for his choice!) who bore a military title to his name, a few years ago, and sat still in one of the theatres of this city, without daring to lift a hand in opposition, while the just-married wife by his side was brutally caned by her millionaire father for daring to marry _him_! High temper may be dangerous, and the rough hand something to be avoided and reprobated; but there is something worse in the extreme opposite, and humanity worse sickens at the sight of an abject poltroon, than at any other worthless fungus that springs as an excrescence from God's footstool.

All the saints be praised for these little women! They _are_, after all, the balance-wheels of life, and the whole machinery would run riot and go to destruction without them. They bring us to ourselves, often, and so save us _from_ ourselves. When they advise peace and patience, they are generally right, for at such times violence is seldom politic. Frank Wallace would probably have carried out his violent first intention, but for the hand of Emily which dropped upon his arm almost before he had risen, and the soft voice which spoke in his ear, very hurriedly:

"Don't, Frank, for _my_ sake! Let me go, and sit still. You shall see me again in a day or two. _I'll_ pay Pa for this!"

Very much consoled by these words, and especially by the last clause, Frank Wallace resumed his seat, merely indulging in a remark which was heard by many around him, and which may or may not have been heard by the person at whom it was aimed:

"Bah! you big brute!"

A little suppressed clapping of hands in the neighborhood, which the actors probably thought intended for themselves, but which certainly was not. Meanwhile Emily Owen, dropping her hand by some kind of unexplainable intuition to the very spot where Frank's was lying, gave it a quick squeeze, then stumbled gracefully over the legs of the persons sitting between her and the aisle, and followed her father. As she passed two or three steps up the aisle, the Judge leading pompously, and the gate-keeper calculating the chances of being able to crush him by accidentally letting the iron gate slam to against his legs,--she encountered a recognition that was almost an adventure. A young girl who sat in the next to the end seat of the back-row of the orchestra, leaned over the gentleman outside and caught her hand, saying:

"Emily Owen--I know it is! Do you not remember me?"

"Josephine Harris! How glad I am to see you!" was the reply of Emily, the moment her eyes fairly took in the face and figure before her.

"I could not see your face before, and did not know that you were here. How long it is since I saw you!--ever since I left Rutgers, and you were still hammering away there!" said Josephine Harris, who was indeed the other, having come down to Wallack's with a party of friends, for the evening, and who had not before had a chance to recognize her old friend and school-fellow at the Rutgers Institute.

"Come and see me. Papa is in a hurry, and I cannot wait," said Emily, doubtful whether her friend had or had not observed the preceding movements. "I have not time for a card--look in the Directory and send me yours. Good night!" and in a moment she was gone, following the Judge to that mental slaughter involved in riding home with him in his present mood, and leaving the performance to pass on again as if no interruption had occurred.

As may be supposed, Frank Wallace was something of an "object of interest" for the small remainder of the evening; but he had no acquaintances in the neighborhood, and not much remark was ventured. One man behind him, indeed, leaned over and said: "Lost your girl, eh?" but Frank's "Ya-a-s!" was so broad and discouraging for any further questions, that the inquiry was not pursued. Most men, under similar circumstances, would have left the theatre at once, to avoid observation and to hide annoyance: he did not, and he may have acted wisely or unwisely in that course of conduct.

Josephine Harris _had_ observed the preceding movements on the part of Judge Owen, and it was through recognition of his figure that she looked after and recognized Emily. Had the latter been left quietly sitting beside her lover, her schoolmate would probably not have seen her face, they would have left the theatre without recognition of each other, and Judge Owen's house might have escaped a very early visit destined to work important changes in the relations of residents and visitors. The puissant and pompous Judge had effected two _coups d'etat_ within as many days. The one had driven Aunt Martha fairly over into the ranks of the enemy: had the second introduced Joe Harris, an electric wire full charged with destruction, into the immediate vicinity of his domestic magazine?

##