Pictures of country life; and summer rambles in green and shady places
Thomas Miller
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, May 17, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1847 Excerpt: ... a juster punishment, than to turn them abroad, without either food or raiment, on some unbounded and frozen desert, and leave them to the same elements and the same mercy, to which they left poor Mary and her child,--the icy torments to which Dante consigned Ugolino and Ruggieri, in his " Inferno." The fact upon which the story of "Pretty Mary" is founded will be familiar to every reader of the newspapers. So recently as about the time of the opening of Parliament, in 1846, a similar scene was repeated:--A poor woman and her infant were sent out of the Union Workhouse at Wootton Basset,Wiltshire, all but naked; the child was picked up dead, and the_woman committed to take her trial for murder. It almost seems, on again reading over this portion of the sketch, that I had been adding a chapter to a Romance, instead of merely painting the scenery amid which this terrible tragedy was enacted.. And what thought young farmer Elliston to all this? He cared not; for the law which should have protected Mary and her child was so framed that it could not touch him--was so worded that a woman who had still a remnant of modesty left, shrunk back in disgust from its aid. The fate of the beautiful and broken-hearted girl seemed to concern him not. Beauty seldom exists without vanity; and, in the higher circles of society, women are hemmed in with binding forms and becoming ceremonies; and when this barrier is overleaped, there comes the law, thundering with indignation, and heavy with damages; while the poorer daughter of Eve is compensated with a broken heart, and an early death! Many a simple country youth and maiden who envied Mary on the day of the statutes, and thought or spoke harshly of her as she passed, were sorry at heart for what they had d...