as a remedial measure. On an occasion of this kind, as late even as April 7, 1832, at Carlisle, one Mrs. Thomson was eloquently shuffled off, at public auction, by her husband, in words following, to wit: "Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my wife, Mary Ann Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part forever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort, and the good of my home; but she became my tormenter, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily devil. Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart, when I say, may God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature. Now, I have shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings, I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women in general:
Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace
To laugh, to weep, to cheat the human race.
She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore's Melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin or whiskey, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her with all her perfections and imperfections, for the sum of fifty shillings." It is proper to add that the account of this curious performance concludes with the statement that, after waiting about an hour, Thomson knocked down the lot to one Henry Mears, for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog; they then parted in perfect good temper—Mears and the woman going one way, Thomson and the dog another. Such an arrangement seems to throw into the shade, as regards swiftness and certainty, even the far-famed facilities of the Indiana law of divorce.
Another English invention for the cooling off of shrews and scolds, was the ducking stool, respecting which Chambers, in his admirable "Book of Days," has presented many curious particulars. The London Evening Post of April 27, 1745, gives a record of one of the latest inflictions of this peculiar punishment. "Last week," says the Post, "a woman that keeps the Queen's Head Ale-House at Kingston, in Surrey, was ordered by the court to be ducked for scolding, and was, accordingly, placed in the chair, and ducked in the river Thames, under Kingston bridge, in the presence of 2,000 or 3,000 people." The details of the performance are thus described by M. Misson, a peripatetic Frenchman, who visited England about the year 1700, and whose range of observation happened to include
