sel, or his conduct, meant solely as an act of gallantry, is sufficient in the eyes of the law to support proof of a promise to marry.

In the light of the adjudicated cases, the verdict in the famous case of Bardell against Pickwick was probably justified. Mrs. Bardell's construction of Mr. Pickwick's earnest question as to whether it would be a greater expense, in her opinion, to keep two persons than to keep one; the fact that Mr. Pickwick asked the plaintiff's little boy how he would like to have another father, coupled with the very damaging testimony that Mr. Pickwick was discovered supporting the fainting lady in his arms, to say nothing of the covert allusions, according to Sergeant Buzfuz, veiled under those poetic effusions "chops" and "tomato sauce," made, at least, a prima facie case in favor of the plaintiff.

A gentleman once concluded that it would be a very elegant and a very funny thing to send to his dulcinea a newspaper article entitled "Love, the Conqueror," marking it: "Read this." The lady did read it, and when the funny gentleman declined to marry her, she brought suit against him and read the article to the jury, who gave her four thou sand dollars damages. The Supreme Court of Illinois, sustaining the verdict, said: "The article may be regarded as the defendant's own letter; it doubtless contained sentiments, which he sanctioned, couched in language more choice than he could compose. It was his appeal for marriage-it foretold in clear and emphatic language his object and intent in his courtship with her. She doubtless placed this construction upon it, as she well might do, and laid it aside as a rare treasure."

Perhaps there is no more wily suitor than the widower. He is no novice, and his experience should count for something. But that even the widower is not proof against folly was proved in a New York case, in which it was shown that the widower, a pious elder of fifty-three, soon after the death of his wife, visited the plaintiff, a maiden lady

of thirty, and taking out a memorandum book, from which he read, or pretended to read, stated in a confidential way, that he had noted down some requests made by his wife four days before her death; that it was something he "could not tell her now," but that she (the maiden lady) "would know some day," darkly hinting, so the lady took it, that the deceased wife had requested the forlorn widower to lighten his grief by marrying the plaintiff. It was proved that after this confidential talk, there were rides and drives together, frequent visits extending till late in the evening, and, to cap the climax, the widower told the plaintiff that after the lapse of a year from the death of his wife (the widower's quarantine, it seems), he intended to marry, and he then entered into a minute description of the lady he wanted to marry, which description was an exact photograph of the plaintiff. While we cannot but admire the shrewd diplomacy of this wily widower, courting by dark insinuations and covert suggestions, and not committing himself by an open avowal, yet, as the sequel shows, he ran amuck of the doctrine of estoppel.

The sanctimonious Proteus forgot his Julia and found him another sweetheart, and, knowing that he had become somewhat involved in his affair with the plaintiff, and, seeming to have some faint notion of the legal maxim, Vigilantibus et non dormientibus jura subserviunt, he diplomatically undertook to checkmate the lady. He told her that he did not want her people to think that he was paying her the attentions of a lover so soon after the death of his wife, and, in order to allay that suspicion, he drew up a note, in which the plaintiff was made to say that she regarded his visits as "simply evidences of friendship and nothing more," and got her to sign it. The jury found in her favor and the Court of Appeals of New York upheld the verdict.

In a Connecticut case the defendant had been heard to remark on his happiness when

in plaintiff's company and his utter misery. unless in her society. The parties had exchanged daguerreotypes, the defendant had taught the plaintiff's nephew to call him. uncle, and had told the plaintiff's brother-inlaw that "all the courting was done," little suspecting that the plaintiff would take a hand at "courting" in the presence of judge and jury.

The defendant afterward went on a voyage, and while on the sea he indited effusive love letters to the plaintiff, telling her how constantly he thought of her while awake and how he dreamed of her while asleep, touchingly adding: "While I am tossed to and fro on this wide ocean, I love thee still." The picture here presented is intensely dramatic, and is well calculated to inspire the belief that this was a case of mad infatuation. Those who had lived through a "tossing to and fro on a wide ocean," and who recall the exact state of their emotions, will readily subscribe to the belief that he who can, while the tossing is in active progress, write, "I love thee still," is more madly in love than was ever Romeo or Abelard.

Yet, notwithstanding all this, this mad lover broke off the engagement, thereby verifying the poet's observation that "Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them-but not for love."

The plaintiff's "courting" was fully as successful as had been that of the defendant, for she recovered a judgment for $1,500.

In a Vermont case the plaintiff and defendant were neighbors, and the defendant paid neighborly visits to the plaintiff's family. It was shown that these visits were at first to the entire family, and that they were gradually narrowed until they were confined to the plaintiff alone. This fact, together with the proof that during the periods of the defendant's visits lights were frequently seen. burning in the parlor on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and some other circumstances, led the jury to find for the plaintiff. Just how

far the circumstantial evidence of the burning lights on Saturday and Sunday nights conduced to the verdict, the reported case does not state, but it may be safely asserted that if the defendant ever runs across those poetic lines

"How silver-sweet sound lovers' tongues by night,

Like softest music to attending ears,"

he will scarcely appreciate the poetic beauty of the lines, having, as they naturally would, to his "attending ears," a sort of silvery jingle-pitiless reminder of the clinking specie paid by him at the instigation of a jury.

A very cruel case occurred in Michigan. A man, who, strange to relate, bore the name of Constant, while engaged in courting, had his financial eye open and borrowed money from the lady. On his last visit to her he renewed his notes for one and two years, and then went off and married the other girl. The court held that it was proper to allow proof of this money transaction, holding that "an engagement broken off suddenly and without warning would very naturally create more pain and mortification than if ended under any other circumstances, and, if a jury were to regard this conduct concerning money matters as calculated, under the circumstances, to have caused additional grounds of pain or grievance to the defendant in error, we think they would not be violating ordinary probabilities."

But slight evidence is necessary to prove the lady's acceptance. This is the law, not upon any presumption that ladies generally are easily persuaded-perish the thought.but out of due deference to the modesty of the sex.

When we consider the touching delicacy of the contractual relation, affecting, as it does, the tenderest emotions of the human heart, it seems like gross inconsistency that

the courts should hold, as they do, that principles of tender do not apply; that it is enough without saying obtulit se at all, if the lady is semper parata. Coke says it is not to be expected that a lady should say to a gentleman: "I am ready to marry you; pray, marry me." Where the defendant asked the hand of the lady in the presence of the latter's mother, who consented, and the lady said nothing, and the defendant thereupon gently took the hand of the mother and touchingly said: "Henceforth consider me as your son," it was held sufficient proof of the lady's consent; and in a New York case the lady was permitted to show that she had procured a wedding dress and had gone so far as to get a wedding cake, as showing her acceptance, while in Iowa the plaintiff was allowed to prove in support of her acceptance that she was making preparation for her marriage "piecing quilts and doing fancy work," and that when she heard of defendant's marriage, "she hated it awful bad."

While the law makes it easy to prove a proposal by the gentleman and equally easy to show that the lady accepted, when it comes to evidence showing a release on the part of the lady, then the proof must be strong to sustain the defence.

In one case a bachelor of fifty-three had been paying his respects to a maiden of fortythree summers for the unlucky period of thirteen years. During all this time she declared to others that she would never marry him and spoke of him in terms of derision and contempt. After thirteen years of courtship, the bachelor summoned sufficient cour

age to propose and was promptly accepted. After the engagement he heard of the double dealings of the maid and refused to marry her. The court held that it was no defence to the action, although it might go in mitigation of damages.

In a Pennsylvania case, the lady wrote the defendant a letter in which she said: "I don't want you, for I know that I would have a devil's life of it. If you were any kind of a gentleman, you would not act as you have. I pray night and day that you may never prosper in this world. I just pray for every hair in your head to come out." And yet she recovered a judgment for $2,000.

In looking beneath the surface for the reason for this verdict, it is quite evident that the jury believed that the lady was goaded to desperation by the attentions of her fiancé to her rival, and that she did not in fact mean to say that she did not want to marry him, and did not really desire that he lose all his hair, for in her letter she says cruelly of her rival: "Well, if I am poor, I do not wear the one hat for five or six years, like she does, and turn it hind part before, like she does." True it is that "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Under the weight of authority, then, if a party does not want to find himself, in the eyes of the law, an engaged man, he must look well to his daily walk and conversation; for, if he has so conducted himself as to be estopped from denying the engagement, he will have a difficult problem to convince a judge and jury that the lady has duly released him. The maxim applicable seems to be caveat amator.

IN

N the month of March, 1874, the last public execution took place in Japan, or at any rate in the neighborhood of the capital, Tokio, and as I had heard that it was to be the last, I determined to witness it, prompted it might have been partly by motives of morbid curiosity, and partly by a desire to see even the ghastly phases of a condition of national life which was then being gradually swept away forever by the wave of western civilization.

In the above-mentioned year the state of law in Japan as regards criminals was very much what it was in England during the Middle Ages. The sword reigned supreme, and an almost invariable accompaniment of the sword was torture. The prisons were veritable hells upon earth-foul, overcrowded, ill-ventilated, insanitary pesthouses, wherein festered without distinction of sex or crime every sort and condition of malefactor. All this has since been changed; even the sword has given way to the garrote, whilst torture is unknown, or at any rate illegal, the prisons are comparatively humane institutions, and the criminal law, which for centuries was of one character for the rich and another for the poor, has been completely reformed on the basis of the principal codes of European nations. This eventful March morning was cold and bright, and as I took my way along the narrow path leading up to the fatal plateau of Tobe, I could not refrain from drawing a contrast between the extreme loveliness of the scene, brightened by the sunshine of a cloudless blue sky, and the awfulness of the spectacle by which it was soon to be blurred. Tobe Hill was especially beautiful on this bright, fresh March morning. Around the space on three sides stretched trees and thickets, displaying that wealth of variety in shape and color

which is SO

characteristic a feature of Japanese woodland scenery, and broken here and there by the red roof of a temple or the thatch of a humble cottage. On the four sides lay spread out a peerless panorama of the Bay of Yedo, with the line of the green hills which overlook the house-dotted Tocaido road trending away into indistinctness until they sank to the level of Kawasaki Point.

I have never felt before or since as I felt during the long two hours I waited for the tragedy to begin; I knew that the sight would be a horrible one and that it would affect me both mentally and bodily, yet I seemed bound to remain by a sort of fascination. The native crowd packed closely together, swarming on the trees and availing themselves of every point of advantage seemed to treat the matter as a holiday exhibition, provided for their entertainment; and laughed, chatted and smoked with the callous indifference bred by constant familiarity with such scenes.

In the middle of an open space some twelve yards square were five square holes a foot deep, the earth out of which was piled into neat heaps in front of each hole, just large enough to enable a man to squat on his heels. Behind the holes was a pile of coarse mats, such as the coolies use for rain coats, and near them a couple of pails of water and camp stool, the whole being railed in by bamboo posts and cords.

At nine o'clock a murmur of more than usual intensity and unanimity announced the approach of some part of the procession, and I saw over the heads of the crowd a smal body of officials and coolies coming up the pathway from the prison. The first arrival, a man attired in a burlesque of the French military undress uniform, seemed to be the

superintendent of the arrangements, for he proceeded to examine closely the holes, and the heaps, pointed out where alterations were needed, turning over the heap of mats, and finally, seated himself on the camp stool in the midst of the space, and gazed around at the crowd in the full consciousness of being for the time one of the most important personages in Yokohama. But his supremacy at once paled when no less an individual than the executioner arrived on the scene. This accomplished amidst a silence so absolute that I could almost hear my heart beat, the great man on the camp-stool rose, and unfolding a large document, read in a loud voice what I supposed to be a description of the crimes for which the poor fellows were to suffer and the process of condemnation and sentence. This was a very long business, and before it had nearly finished the native spectators were laughing and joking upon the appearance of the doomed men, with that callousness to human suffering which so much blackens the otherwise amiable and pleasing character of the Japanese people. At last it was finished. As there were but five holes for seven prisoners, two would be obliged to remain in blind agony whilst their companions were being despatched. Five men were accordingly thrust forward with the staves and fists of the police; each man was made to squat on a mound, his clothesif filthy, tattered rags could be called clothes-stripped from his shoulders, his hands tied behind his back, and his head pushed forward over the holes. Undoubtedly execution by the trenchant Japanese sword is as merciful a death as can be desired; but the Oriental nature, as if to compensate for this erring on the side of mercy, counterbalances it by an undue prolongation of the preparations for death, which is worse than a hundred deaths.

So in this case. As the poor fellows knelt over their holes the executioner slowly and deliberately took off his coat and bared his

arms. Then he took from its silk casing the fatal sword, examined it fondly and lingeringly from the Yasuri me or filings on the hilt to keep the grash iron from slipping along the kirimon, or groove in the blade, to the point, held it over a pail whilst a cooly trickled water down it, and with a great deal of settling of his feet was ready. I was sick and giddy, but I kept my eyes fixed on the scene. At a sign from the official on the camp-stool, the executioner raised his sword slightly, hardly half a dozen inches, and before I could realize it the man's head was hanging over the hole by a single ligament, and the blood was gushing out in torrents.

I then saw why the executioner had so completely severed the head; and the wonderful skill of the Japanese swordmen, using as they do the most perfect weapons in the world, can be imagined in so arranging the force of the blow that absolute decapitation does not take place. He tore the head off, and held it toward the four sides of the square; then he gave it to a cooly, who roughly plastered the severed portion with clay and stuck it on to a kind of elevated shelf. In the meantime two coolies were thumping on the back of the prostrate body to hasten the rush of blood, after which one of the coarse mats was thrown over it and it was laid aside.

I had seen enough, and I turned my head away as the executioner, after wiping his blade with paper, approached the other poor wretch, who was shouting out something at the top of his voice, whether a confession or a denunciation of injustice I was not scholar enough to understand. But although I turned my head away and saw not, I heard every sound, and could follow every act in the ghastly tragedy with exactitude. A movement amongst the crowd in a short time made me look round, and to my amazement within that square space there was not a living human being but the officials and their subordinates.