In these pages, a woman, a wife and mother, speaks the sorrows and oppressions of which she has been the witness and the victim.It is because her sorrows and her oppressions are those of thousands, who, suffering like her, cannot or dare not speak for themselves, that she thus gives this history to the public.It is no sensational story, but a plain, unvar-nished tale of truth, stranger and sadder than fic-tion.