satin shoes, lace collars, gold bracelets,
breloques, chains, hair-pins, furniture, and pet
dogs, constituting, among a thousand like
articles, what is called personalty, belong
unreservedly to the husband; who can pawn,
sell, or give them away, the instant the
clergyman has pronounced the marriage
blessing. Now what do you say to these as
perquisites of the gaoler marital?

Turning now from property to divorce—
what do we find? A gaoler marital may
entertain as many ladies light-of-love as he
pleases. He may support them out of his
wife's property, he may even endow them
with that property after his death, and leave
his lawful lady and her children to want and
misery,—and the wife has no remedy. The
relief of divorce was not instituted for her.
Many have tried the question, and almost all
have been thrown. In an infinite number of
years, and out of millions of victims groaning
for deliverance, only four have obtained
divorce. Cruelty, infidelity, vice, crime,
desertion, nothing that would seem to be a
natural and common-sense breaking of the
nuptial bond is allowed to stand as a legal
severance, for her benefit. The wife must
bear her chains to the grave, though they
eat into her very soul; she must submit to
every species of wrong and tyranny—the law
has no shield for her! But when a gaoler
wishes to get rid of a prisoner, it is quite
another thing! It is in reality but an affair
of money. If he can afford the various
legal processes demanded by our wise laws,
he can be free to-morrow,—be his wife the
most virtuous lady in the land. If he chooses
he can collude with some villain, whom he
accuses of being his wife's lover. The man
does not defend the action, and judgment is
allowed to go by default. The villain is
assessed in damages which he may pay with
one hand and receive with the other. We
say that, all this may happen if a gaoler
will; the law does not provide against such
a possibility. The accused wife is not told
of the time or manner of the trial. She is
not supposed to appear as a witness, nor to
defend herself by counsel. The action is not
brought against her, but against the lover,
for damage alleged to be done to the gaoler's
property; the wife's existence, as wife or
woman is ignored; she is only judged and
assessed by her monetary value. This is the
English law of divorce, and English gentlemen's
feelings on conjugal infidelity. And
then we ridicule the foreigner's belief that
we sell our wives, because we do not take
them to market with a halter round their
necks,—at least, not when we are in good
society,—and because we only receive money
as a manly manner of compensation, when
they have given their souls and love to
another. The difference may be great in
form; certainly the one mode is simpler than
the other; but surely the spirit is identically
the same!

This, then, is marriage: on the one side
a gaoler, on the other a prisoner for life, a,
legal nonentity, classed with infants and
idiots; or, if there should ever come liberty,
coming only through that poor prisoner's
hopeless ruin;—ruin she is powerless to
avert, be she the most innocent of God's
creatures. Neither property nor legal
recognition, neither liberty nor protection has she,
nothing but a man's fickle fancy, and a man's
frail mercy between her and misery, between
her and destruction. This is marriage as
by the law of England. Let those who doubt
it, and those who do not doubt it, consult
  the vigorous and manly writer, with a head
  as sound as his heart, whose pamphlet has
supplied these notable illustrations.

SCOTCH COAST FOLK.

The Bridge of Don has, for many centuries,
been a bridge of renown, under the name of
the Brig o' Balgounie. Indeed, ever since
the quaking, shivering, cracking, shifting,
rising, sinking, and revolutionary planet
Earth, which we inhabit—delusively believing
the plaything of fire and flood is something
staid, solid, and conservative—split the rocks
of Balgounie into a chasm of frowning granite,
the locality has not been one to be forgotten
by man or beast, however slightly tinctured
with geological curiosity. When the split
was made by an earthquake, the waters of
the hills and the waves of the sea filled
it up with diluvial soil, or with sand and
pebbles. Ever since, the river called the
Don has flowed through it to the sea.
Probably, the records of a grand catastrophe of
nature, inscribed upon the spot, were the
first sources of the traditions which filled
this dark abyss with supernatural creatures,
—with Neptunic and Vulcanic impersonations,
kelpies and brownies. No doubt the wild
chasm seemed something quite formidable
when it cut off communication between the
scanty families who inhabited the district of
Buchan and the few hundreds of persons who
  formed the germs of the populations of Old
  and New Aberdeen.

After the Scotch had secured their independence,
by the final expulsion of the English
from Scotland, they naturally turned their
attention to the improvement of the
communications of their country; and bridge-
building must have seemed the most glorious
art of the epoch. The Brig o' Balgounie
would of good right attract universal fame.
The bridge was built towards the end of the
reign of Robert the Bruce, upon the estate
of Balgounie, and was probably as great a
marvel of the art of the engineer, in the
fourteenth, as the tubular bridge is in
the nineteenth century. The River Don,
in approaching the sea, flows slowly and
darkly through a chasm in the granite
rocks, which is fully half-a-mile long. Being
black and deep, one corner of it is called