joys and the cause of his sorrows, this say ing was amply verified. It took many days to collect evidence against the lady sufficient to justify the Court in declaring the match off. It was finally accomplished, however, and now my friend revels in his restored state of single blessedness, although he asserts that he can feel himself but semi-detached. Incidentally to my association with this case I learned many interesting facts con nected with the disconnection of the mar riage bond. Divorce appears to be a habit that grows on one. I heard of one charm ing woman who, after a brief season of mar ried life, divorced her husband for just and adequate cause. She returned to her native town, met an early lover who meanwhile had married, was the cause of his divorcing his wife, after which she married him and settled down to apparent contentment. Habit, how ever, was strong upon her, and, after a short time, she again appealed to the courts, which, anxious to oblige a lady, once more severed her bonds. Her ex-husband returned and re-married his first wife, while my heroine, after a short season of retirement, formed a marriage combination with a gentleman who, knowing her record, and being of a ready wit, died before she had time to divorce him. This lady must have believed implicitly that, in the possible hereafter, there shall be no marrying nor giving in marriage, neither any recognition of earthly marriage con tracts, else she would never have dared arrange for herself a last condition which should be so much worse than her first. There seems, to the lay mind, to be a great many complex and wonderful things con nected with the laws governing marriage and divorce. For instance, I am told that per sons divorced in New York may not again marry in that State, but they may take a ferry across a river to a little State lying just opposite New York, and which I believe is called New Jersey, and there they may wed
with the sanction of church and law. Then they may come back and live in New York without attention being called to their some what anomalous position. If a married couple take a dislike to one another, and the laws of their resident State offer no opportunity for release, one of them removes to another State, where the laws are more obliging, establishes a residence by spending a few months there, and then re turns free. I am told of a place in the West where the thing is so easily and simply done that it has become the very Mecca of the dissatisfied pilgrims on the matrimonial road. There was a time when a Western city named Chicago was jeered at because of the simplicity with which it settled marital diffi culties; but that city has, I believe, mended its ways in this respect, and now one must journey even farther toward the setting sun to have a divorce granted " while you wait." One amusing point I have discovered is, that most of the divorced ones rush almost immediately from the alleged frying-pan into the probable fire; that is, no sooner is one marriage bond dissolved than another is con tracted, and the questionable part of it is, that evidence in many cases suggests the active consideration of the forming of the second bond before the dissipation of the first. I should think it would all be very confusing. A simple fisherman, in the pretty play "Alabama," objects to a railroad running through his country because it "tends to discourage the frogs." My objection to this divorce railroading is that it "tends to discourage" matrimony, and, being a single man, with a possible yearning for matrimonial bliss, I feel that I have a right to file my objection. Why would it not be a good plan to have national divorce laws, so that if you were divorced in one State your position would be the same in all, and you wouldn't have to cross a State line to be respectable. Make the require ments as simple as seemeth good in the eyes
