From Troy I went, first to Newburyport, Mass., where I had some
business, and where I remained a week, and then returned to Troy
again. Next I went to Bennington, Vt., to sell medicines and
practice, and I found enough to occupy me there for full two months.
From Bennington to Rutland, selling medicines on the way, and at
Rutland I intended to stay for some time. My oldest son was there
well established in the medical business, and I thought that both of
us together might extend a wide practice and make a great deal of
money.
No doubt we might have done so, if I had minded my medical business
only, and had let matrimonial matters alone. I had just got rid of a
worthless woman in New Hampshire with a very narrow escape from
State prison. But, as my readers know by this time, all experience,
even the bitterest, was utterly thrown away upon me; I seemed to get
out of one scrape only to walk, with my eyes open, straight into
another.
At the hotel where I went to board, there was temporarily staying a
woman, about thirty-two years old, Margaret Bradly, by name, who
kept a large millinery establishment in town. I became acquainted
with her, and she told me that she owned a house in the place, in
which she and her mother lived; but her mother had gone away on a
visit, and as she did not like to live alone she had come to the
hotel to stay for a few days till her mother returned. Margaret was
a fascinating woman; she knew it, and it was my miserable fate to
become intimate, altogether too intimate with this designing
milliner.
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