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But his evil star still lingered above the horizon. One summer evening, on returning from the hayfield, who should meet him but his witch wife from Ohio! She came riding up the street on her old white horse, with a pillion behind the saddle. Accosting him in a kindly tone, yet not without something of gentle reproach for his unhandsome desertion of her, she informed him that she had come all the way from Ohio to take him back again.

It was in vain that he pleaded his later engagements; it was in vain that his new wife raised her shrillest remonstrances, not unmingled with expressions of vehement indignation at the revelation of her husband’s real position; the witch wife was inexorable; go he must, and that speedily. Fully impressed with a belief in her supernatural power of compelling obedience, and perhaps dreading more than witchcraft itself the effects of the unlucky disclosure on the temper of his New England helpmate, he made a virtue of the necessity of the case, bade farewell to the latter amidst a perfect hurricane of reproaches, and mounted the white horse, with his old wife on the pillion behind him.

Of that ride Burger might have written a counterpart to his ballad:–

“Tramp, tramp, along the shore they ride,
Splash, splash, along the sea.”

Two or three years had passed away, bringing no tidings of the unfortunate husband, when he once more made his appearance in his native village. He was not disposed to be very communicative; but for one thing, at least, he seemed willing to express his gratitude. His Ohio wife, having no spell against intermittent fever, had paid the debt of nature, and had left him free; in view of which, his surviving wife, after manifesting a due degree of resentment, consented to take him back to her bed and board; and I could never learn that she had cause to regret her clemency.