Event. Catherine, onely daughter of Colonel Battledown eloped with Mr.
Archibald Malmaison of Malmaison. The Fugitives escaped by the pantry
dore, and before they could be overtaken, had been maid man and wife by
the under Gardner in the tool house in the corner of the yard. An
application will be made to Parlement to dissolve the marriage untill the
parties are out of the Nursrie." By this it may appear that Sir Clarence
had even more humor than orthography.

It was a few weeks after this event that poor old Aunt Jane left the world
by way of the ornamental fish-pond. The pond in question lay on the
boundary-line between the Malmaison estate and that of the Pennroyals; and
the ornamentation consisted of two flights of steps leading down to the
water, and of half a dozen willows whose twisted trunks bent over the
surface. Although of no great area, this pond was startlingly deep, and
the bottom, when you got to it, was of the softest and most unfathomable
mud. Had not Aunt Jane been seen just as she was sinking for the third
time, therefore, the chances are that she would never have been seen till
doomsday; there was room, and to spare, for all the Malmaison line in the
slimy depths of that pool. After the catastrophe, Mr. Pennroyal caused a
handsome iron railing to be erected round the scene of it. This act caused
it to be said that he might have done it before. Did he expect his future
wives to go the road of the first one? And was it not criminal negligence
in him to have suffered her to escape from her attendants? How could such
a thing have happened? Did Mr. Pennroyal consider that people might say
that the death of his wife was no loss to him, but the contrary? because
that fifty thousand pounds of hers, of which, during her lifetime, he
could touch only the interest, became, at her decease, his absolute
property, to do with as he liked. Under such circumstances, a gentleman
careful of his reputation should have guarded her as the apple of his eye.
It was certainly very odd that a poor frail crazy creature should have