this--united, I tell you, in defiance of all human laws and of
all human notions of right and wrong.

"This is my belief. I have proved it by my own life. Maid, wife,
and widow, I have held to it, and I have found it good.

"I was born, madam, in the rank of society to which you belong. I
received the mean, material teaching which fulfills the worldly
notion of education. Thanks be to God, my kindred spirit met _my_
spirit while I was still young. I knew true love and true union
before I was twenty years of age. I married, madam, in the rank
from which Christ chose his apostles--I married a laboring-man.
No human language can tell my happiness while we lived united
here. His death has not parted us. He helps me to write this
letter. In my last hours I shall see him standing among the
angels, waiting for me on the banks of the shining river.

"You will now understand the view I take of the tie which unites
the young spirits of our children at the bright outset of their
lives.

"Believe me, the thing which your husband's brother has proposed
to you to do is a sacrilege and a profanation. I own to you
freely that I look on what I have done toward thwarting your
relative in this matter as an act of virtue. You cannot expect
_me_ to think it a serious obstacle to a union predestined in
heaven, that your son is the squire's heir, and that my
grandchild is only the bailiff's daughter. Dismiss from your
mind, I implore you, the unworthy and unchristian prejudices of
rank. Are we not all equal before God? Are we not all equal (even