A wild lament broke from the audience, and a woman with a face bruised to a symphony in green, yellow, and black thus identified herself as the wife of the defendant, who stood vacantly turning his cap round in his hand while sympathizing friends hurried her from the room. The poor creature probably knew that if in their late differences she had got more than she deserved, she had not got more than she had been willing to give, and was moved by this reflection. Other moralists, who do not like to treat woman as a reasonable being, may attribute her sorrow to mere blind tenderness, or hysterical excitement. I could not see that it touched the spectators in any way; and I suspect that, whatever was thought of her escape from a like fate, there was a general acquiescence in the justice of his. He was either stunned by it, or failed to take it in, for he remained standing at the end of the table and facing the judge, till the policeman in charge took him by the arm and stood him aside. IV. He sat down, and I saw him no more; but I had no time to regret him, for his place was instantly occupied by a person who stepped within the bar from the audience. I had already noticed him coming in and going out of the court-room, apparently under strong excitement, and hovering about, now among the gentlemen of the bar, and now among friends in the audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and yet he looked like a gentleman--a gentleman in distress of mind; I had supposed that he could not be one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have been allowed so much at large. At the same time that he took his place he was confronted from the other end of the long table by a person whom I will call a lady, because I observed that every one else did so. This lady’s person tended to fat; she had a large, red face, and I learned without surprise that she was a cook. She wore a crimson shawl, and a bonnet abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking colors, and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, impressively swathed in linen; she caressed, as it were, a small water-pitcher, which I felt, in spite of its ordinary appearance, was somehow historical. In fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important part in the assault which the lady accused the gentleman at the other end of the table of committing upon her. It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a boarder in the house where she was cook, and that he was in the habit of intruding upon her in the kitchen against her will and express command. A week before (I understood that she had spent the intervening time in suffering and disability) she had ordered him out, and he had turned furiously upon her with an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with it, and then had thrown at her head the pitcher which she now held in her hands. There were other circumstances of outrage, which I cannot now recall, but they are not important in view of the leading facts.