The old merchants of New York City / by Walter Barrett.

142

THE OLD MERCHLANTS

that Mr Parish knew what he was about. To keep up
this farce and awful fraud, of course it was necessary to
keep him away from his brother Daniel Parish, and
those who could not long have been deceived had they
been permitted free access to the unfortunate man. She
denied them all. She slept in the room with him, and
all through six long years that he remained upon earth,
reduced to a hopeless idiot, from which mental condition
he never recovered. His bodily health was good. His
appetite returned. He had the use of one eye, and the
perfect use of the left hand and arm, and yet he was
never able, during the six years, to write, to read, to
distinguish one figure or letter from another - to utter
one word, or to give a single reliable indication of intelligence or intention higher in grade than such as would
be exhibited by the common and unlearned pig.
Yet this clever wife, assisted by the shrewd lawyer,
made him on several occasions give away large amounts
of property, as he certainly never would have done in
his days of good sense. She got all his personal estate
in her own name. She or her agents managed all his
property. She kept him a close prisoner all the time.
She was inspired, and always found out what her husband meant. She opened an account in her own name
at the Phoenix Bank in 1849, a month after her husband
became an imbecile, and by 1850 she had got everything into her own hands. She speculated to the amount
of a million of dollars. She treated her husband as a
nobody. She had transferred property to the amount
of $900,000 to her own name, up to the time of his
death.
She claimed all the property devised to her in the
codicils after his death. A long lawsuit followed. She
reaped no fruits from the trial, for ere it was finally set