Williams’s men had much the best of it with the mass. They addressed themselves to prejudices as wide as the dominion of man; and a certain personal zeal was mingled with their cupidity. Then they had, by far, the easiest task. He who merely aids the evil principles of our nature, provided he conceal the cloven foot, is much more sure of finding willing listeners than he who looks for support in the good. A very unusual sort of story was circulated in this bar-room at the expense of the accused, and which carried with it more credit than common, in consequence of its being so much out of the beaten track of events as to seem to set invention at defiance. Mary Monson was said to be an heiress, well connected, and well educated—or, as these three very material circumstances were stated by the Williams’ men—“well to do herself, of friends well to do, and of excellent schooling.” She had been married to a person of equal position in society, wealth and character, but many years her senior—too many, the story went, considering her own time of life; for a great difference, when one of the parties is youthful, is apt to tax the tastes too severely—and that connection had not proved happy. It had been formed abroad, and more on foreign than on American principles; the bridegroom being a Frenchman. It was what is called a _mariage de raison_, made through the agency of friends and executors, rather than through the sympathies and feelings that should alone bring man and woman together in this, the closest union known to human beings. After a year of married life abroad, the unmatched couple had come to America, where the wife possessed a very ample fortune. This estate the recently enacted laws gave solely and absolutely to herself; and it soon became a source of dissension between man and wife. The husband, quite naturally, considered himself entitled to advise and direct, and, in some measure, to control, while the affluent, youthful, and pretty wife, was indisposed to yield any of the independence she so much prized, but which, in sooth, was asserted in the very teeth of one of the most salutary laws of nature. In consequence of this very different manner of viewing the marriage relation, a coolness ensued, which was shortly followed by the disappearance of the wife. This wife was Mary Monson, who had secreted herself in the retired dwelling of the Goodwins, while the hired agents of her husband were running up and down the land in search of the fugitive in places of resort. To this account, so strange, and yet in many respects so natural, it was added that a vein of occult madness existed in the lady’s family; and it was suggested that, as so much of her conduct as was out of the ordinary course might be traced to this malady, so was it also possible that the terrible incidents of the fire and the deaths were to be imputed to the same deep affliction.