“The debts kep’ gettin’ bigger all the time and I begun to get scared for fear the furniture would be took away—we hadn’t paid more’n half up and then there was a good deal of interest. I went one day to see a lawyer, but he didn’t tell me anything that done me any good and I had to pay him ten dollars out of my next month’s wages, so that made me all the worse off. Lawyers get their money awful easy, don’t they? I always wished I could be a lawyer and if I had my life to live over again I would be one if I could. “It seemed as if things kep’ gettin’ worse at home and I stayed out a good many nights because I didn’t want a row for I knew there’d be one as soon as I got home. So far most of our fightin’ had been only jawin’ back an’ forth. Once she threw a dish at me and I slapped her in the face, but didn’t hurt her, and I guess she didn’t try hard to hit me with the dish; anyhow if she had wanted to she was near enough so she could. “One night though, I come home pretty late. I’d been out with the boys to a caucus and we had drunk quite a bit. The alderman was running again and had got us a keg of beer. I didn’t really know what I was doin’ when I came in. I was hopin’ she’d be in bed but she was waitin’ for me when I come in and said: ‘There comes my drunkard again. This is a pretty time of night to get home! You’d better go back to your drunken cronies and stay the rest of the night,’—and a lot of more things like that. I told her to shut up and go to bed, but that made her madder and then she called me a lot of names. I told her to stop or I’d choke her, but she kep’ right on talkin’, callin’ me a drunkard and all kinds of names, and tellin’ me how I’d treated her and the boy; I couldn’t make her keep still; the more I threatened her the more she talked. Finally she said, ‘You cowardly brute, I dare you to touch me!’ and she kind of come right up to where I was. Of course I didn’t really half think what I was doin’, but I drawed off and hit her in the face with my fist. I guess I hit her pretty hard; anyhow she fell on the floor, and I ran up to her to pick her up, but she said, ‘Leave me alone, you coward,’ and then I was madder’n ever and I kicked her. The next day she went to the police court and had me arrested. The judge was awful hard on me, told me if he had his way ‘bout it he’d have a law made to have wife-beaters whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails in the public square, and he fined me one hundred dollars.