JUDGE OWEN AND HIS DOMESTIC DISCIPLINE--TWO CRIMINALS AT THE BAR, WITH A SPECIAL EDICT FOLLOWING--A ROW AT WALLACK'S, AND ONE MORE RECOGNITION.
It has again been unavoidable, in following the fortunes of other characters connected with this narration, to lose sight of those who have prominently figured in the mansion of Judge Owen--the Judge himself, his wife, his daughter Emily, Aunt Martha, and the two lovers who fought over that very pretty little bone as if they had been dogs and she a tit-bit of very different description. But it is one of the first principles of conducting the successful march of an army, that no stragglers should be allowed to lag too far behind, lest a sudden onslaught upon them might cause a panic extending to all the other portions of the force. Let the Judge and his family, then, be kept up as nearly as possible to the march of the main body; and especially let not pretty Emily Owen and her mischievous printer-lover be lost from the ranks by any contingency.
Aunt Martha saw farther into futurity than her niece, when she decided that the row between Frank Wallace and Colonel John Boadley Bancker, if it came to the Judge's ears, would be likely to make affairs much worse instead of better; and Emily and she had some serious conversation over the prospect, that night of the street accident, after both the rivals had gone,--which did not tend to make the young girl go to her white pillow with the most blissful of anticipations. The younger lady thought it doubtful whether the matter need come to the knowledge of her father at all, as she did not believe that the Colonel would so far bemean himself as to make a complaint to the father of the young girl he was pursuing, of the advantages which another suitor might possess over him in the mind of the girl herself. Aunt Martha, who had seen somewhat more than her niece of the world and its meanness, did not consider the Colonel too proud to take such a course, if he believed himself likely to gain by it; and besides--she remembered, what her niece did not, that they were by no means alone in the house when the little affair occurred. Servants--those important personages, who in modern days keep the houses and permit their masters and mistresses, on the payment of a round sum per week, to live in the house with them--those ubiquitous personages, who seem to have the faculty of being precisely where they are not wanted, when any family trouble is to be ventilated,--servants were in the house at the time, and there was no guaranty whatever that they had not been sufficiently near to hear every awkward word that had been spoken.