The legal privileges of the married woman are not sufficiently well known. Like "the infant" she is, indeed, the darling of the law. What a fine commercial spree an "infant" could have who looked older than his years and had an elementary knowledge of the law of "infants"! Luckily they do not teach anything useful at educational establishments, and the "infant" never learns about his glorious legal status until it is too late to exploit it. But a married woman can, and does, have a real good time at the expense of her own particular tyrant, man. Recently at Quarter Sessions a man was accused of stealing the spoons, and his wife was accused of receiving the property knowing it to have been stolen. But it was pointed out that it was one of the rights of a married woman to receive whatever her husband happened to bring home, and the judge directed an acquittal. There are several pretty little distinctions in the criminal law in favour of the married lady, but perhaps it is not seemly to advertise them overmuch. When we come to so-called civil matters, the lady who does not know and exercise her legal privileges is indeed a _rara avis_. How many of the debt-collecting cases in the County Court are concerned with the good lady who runs into debt with the tally-man or other tradesman to the husband unknown? True, in many of these the husband has a possible defence, but the good man is generally a sporting, careless fellow, and pays his five shillings a month in the belief that debt is a natural sequence of matrimony. But when it comes to committing wrongs--or torts, to use the Norman slang of the law--the married woman is the only legal personality that is privileged to forget her duty to her neighbour at someone else's expense. Her unhappy husband is always liable for the damages and costs, although he may have done his best to hinder the wrong that has been done. If in his absence on the daily round the good lady slanders her neighbour's wife, or trespasses on her neighbour's garden to commit the further wrong of slapping her neighbour's infant, the husband, for the purposes of paying damages, is regarded by the law as being a joint offender. The law supposes that a wife acts under her husband's directions. When they told Mr. Bumble that, he replied in the immortal phrase, "If the law supposes that, the law is a ass--a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience."