Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 3.

Not so thinks Idomen; she says: Thus wrote Ethelwald, a seraph in mind as in form, under circumstances where any other man would have shown both pique and resentment.

‘All excuse and self-complaisance forsook me. I felt as if unworthy of heaven or earth.’ And the exasperated reader is inclined to agree with her. From this time on, Idomen gives herself up to despair. She fully resolves on death, and is constantly devising means to be free from the world and its evils. She tries laudanum and arsenic, but finds in them only sickness, and not the death she seeks.

Her uncle in Cuba dies, leaving her some property, and she resolves to return to that dearly-loved land. In her journey through Canada she again meets Ethelwald. ‘A word or promise must have united our destinies, but neither word nor promise was spoken. Something both wished to impart seemed struggling to burst from our lips; but neither had the power of utterance. Our tongues were like tongues of the entranced.’

And so they part never to meet again. Ethelwald writes and asks her address, promising a full explanation. She answers: ‘I go, perhaps never to return. I ask no explanation. May every happiness attend you!’

She finds a secluded home in Cuba. A neighboring planter who had wished to marry her, urged by jealousy or some worse passion, told her that her present way of living was not only ruinous to herself, but disgraceful to her child, and to all her relatives in Canada.

This so affected the sensitive mind of Idomen that she was stricken with fever; and in a moment of frenzy evaded her attendants and threw herself into the River Yumuri, flowing through her lands.

As a story, ‘Idomen’ will find readers, to-day, only among the curious or among those who, like ourselves, are interested in whatever belongs to the Medford of long ago. It cannot, however, be considered merely as a story. Mr. Griswold, a dear and trusted friend,