The bridge had been cut by an Irish mechanic in the employ of the road, who, for some misdemeanor, had been reprimanded and turned out, and who had passed half the night in preparing his demoniac revenge. It afterwards appeared that he had been a state's prison convict in a neighboring state, and that he would have been still in confinement, had not the officious zeal of certain benevolent persons availed to set him loose before his time. CHAPTER XX. For true it is, as _in principio, Mulier est hominis confusio;_ Madam, the meaning of this Latin is, That woman is to man his sovereign bliss. * * * * * A woman's counsel brought us first to woe, And made her man his paradise forego.-- These are the words of Chanticleer, not mine; I honor dames, and think their sex divine.--_Dryden_. On the day after their return, Morton visited Miss Leslie to learn if she had suffered from the fatigues and alarms of yesterday; and, in truth, she had the pale face of one whose rest has been short and broken. "It has been my fate to terrify you," said the anxious Morton. During his visit, the door bell was most obtrusively busy. Messages, parcels, notes, cards, visitors came in, and expelled all hope of a _tete a tete_. Soon after he left the room, Leslie entered. "Who gave you those flowers, Edith?" "Mr. Morton, sir." "Humph!" ejaculated Leslie, with a look by no means of gratification. Meanwhile, Morton, walking the street in an abstracted mood, overtook unawares his bachelor friend Mr. Benedick Sharpe, jurist, philosopher, and man of letters--a personage whose ordinary discourse was a singular imbroglio of irony and earnest. "Why, Morton, what problem of ethnology are you at now? the unity of the human race, and the descent from Adam--science versus orthodoxy--is that it?" "Nothing so deep." "What, nothing ethnological?" "Nothing at all." "Ah, then I begin to tremble for you. There's but one thing else could lose you in such a maze. The flame of a candle is very pretty; but the moth that flies into it scorches his wings, poor devil." "I am too dull to see through your metaphors." "There's another blind divinity besides Justice. Beware the shoal of matrimony! Many a good fellow has been wrecked there." "Harping on your old string! You are a professed woman hater." "Who, I? Now that is a scandalous libel. I admire them,--of course." "And yet there's not a lady of your acquaintance whom I have not heard you analyze, criticise, cavil at, and disparage." "My dear fellow!" "You have no conscience to deny it."