"Mr. Magistrate," said the young husband, "as I am under my oath, I can only relate the acts which followed from the inference of my feelings. My first sense was that of astonishment too intense not to appear unreal and even amusing. It seemed to me that if I would laugh out loud all would come back, as delusions yield to scepticism and mockery. But it was too cold not to be real, the scene and persons were too familiar to be erroneous. I had to realize that I was in one of the great and terrible occasional convulsions of human nature. Do you know how it next affected me? With an instant's sense of sublimity! I said to myself, 'How dared I marry so much beauty and womanly majesty? Doing so, I have tempted the old gods and their fates and furies. This is poetical punishment for my temerity.' Still all the while I was laboring at the one scull left in the boat while my brain was fuming so, and listening for sounds on the water. I heard the sailor cry twice, and then his voice fainted away. I began to weep at the oar while I strained upon it, and called 'Help!' and implored God's intervention. At last I sat down in the boat, worn out and in despair, and let it drift down all the city's front, past lights and glooms and floating ice, and wished that I were dead. My father's kindness and all our disagreements rose to mind, and it seemed God's punishment that I had married where his intentions were. Yet to know the truth of this, I said a prayer upon my knees in the wet boat while my teeth chattered, and before the end of my prayer had come I was thinking of my wife's pure name, and how this would spot her as with stains of blood unless I could explain it. "When I reached this stage of my exalted sensibilities I was nearly crazed. There had been no witness of our marriage except the minister, and he was already dead. We had been married at the country parsonage of an old retired minister beyond Oxford church, on the road from Frankford town, as we drove out one afternoon, and I prevailed with my conscientious wife to yield her scruples to our heart's necessity. 'Great God!' I thought aloud--for none could hear me there--'how dreadfully that secret marriage will compromise my wife! Who will believe us without a witness of what I must assert--a story so improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of Kensington will accord none to her. They will charge on her maturer mind the whole responsibility, paint her in the colors of ingratitude, and find in her greatest poverty the principal motive. Yes, they may be wicked enough to say she compassed the death of my father by my hands, to get his property.'