We stopped in
Saratoga at a hotel, which is now in very different hands, but which
was then kept by proprietors who, in addition to a most excellent
table and accommodations, afforded their guests the opportunity, if
they desired it, of attending prayers every night and morning in one
of the parlors. This may have been the inducement which made Eliza
insist upon going to this house, but I doubt it.
For our stay at Saratoga, three or four days, was one wild revel. We
rode about, got drunk, went to the Lake, came back to the hotel, and
the second day we were there, Eliza sent her sister for a
Presbyterian minister, whose address she had somehow secured, and
this minister came to the hotel and married us. I presume I
consented, I don't know, for I was too much under the effect of
liquor to know much of anything. I have an indistinct recollection
of some sort of a ceremony, and afterwards Eliza showed me a
certificate-no Troy affair, but a genuine document signed by a
minister residing in Saratoga, and witnessed by her sister and some
one in the hotel who had been called in. But the whole was like a
dream to me; it was the plot of an infamous woman to endeavor to
make herself respectable by means of a marriage, no matter to whom
or how that marriage was effected.
Meanwhile, the Montpelier papers had the whole story, one of them
publishing a glowing account of my elopement with Miss Gurnsey, and
the facts of our marriage at Saratoga was duly chronicled.
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