“It was my husband and that copper-headed scamp that robbed Mr. Smith’s store. They two planned it weeks and weeks ago; but it was not till Smith took a new boy on, that they could make anything of a haul. They did it together. My own husband, who is a footman in Fifth Avenue, only he goes by another name, expects that will carry him through bigamy and burglary, and everything else bad that begins with a B. In short, sir, only this morning, going out to my day’s work, as innocent as a lamb, thinking my husband was at his place down town, where females couldn’t come, though I never saw a smithereen of his money—not I. Well, yer honor, I went to me day’s work in a new place, being on account of another woman’s not being well, and there I finds my own husband making up to a creature that yer honor wouldn’t wipe your shoes on, saving yer presence, and she calling him Mr. Mahone, and talking about a wedding dress that stands alone with richness, and a Miss Spicer, who wants eternal and everlasting disgrace to fall on a family by the name of Laurence. “Well, yer honor, the long and the short of it is this entirely. Jared Boyce and his brother, me own lawfully wedded husband, robbed Mr. Smith’s store, both of groceries and money, which they divided atween them, in my own room, and the groceries they packed away under my bed and in the closet, and me saying nothing, till they come one night and carried them away; so I, being put about by this, followed after them, and, with my own eyes, saw Jared and me husband hide the groceries and other things away in a wood-house back of a little place where I afterwards saw yon woman going in and out as if she belonged there. “Well, yer honor, I said nothing about that, but minded me work, and keeping the baby nice in hopes it might ’tice me husband home more, wondering what it all meant, when I found out behind that close-horse in the laundry what was going on in them underground rooms, where servants set up for ladies; I just wiped the soap suds from my arms, put on my bit of a hood and foregathered awhile with a policeman that stands on our corner, about the best way of telling the truth and keeping me husband from that prowling lion with the cap, and it please your honor, he told me to come down here, and never fear that your honor wouldn’t give Robert a taste of Blackwell’s Island which I hope you will, just enough to set him straight and keep him out of the way of females in caps till he turns to his own lawfully married wife and child. That is all I ask your honor, and if you don’t believe me, just send some one up to me little place and I’ll show him a chist of tea and a box of crackers that they left with me, besides other things just to pacify me for taking off the rest, which I didn’t like at all, not always having tea and such things in the house.” Here Mrs. Boyce was interrupted by the Judge, who pointed towards the door, and in a stern voice ordered the officer to stop that man.