60 Vt. 364 | Vt. | 1888
The opinion of the court was delivered by
I. We think that the testimony of the plaintiff’s wife was properly admitted. Two persons are necessary parties to a contract. The plaintiff and defendant had no personal interview in making the contract. The interview was conducted wholly through the plaintiff’s wife, as an agent. As the agent of the defendant she took a proposition for a contract, to her husband. When she had delivered the proposition, she had accomplished the work committed to her agency by the defendant. The plaintiff could send his acceptance, or rejection, by the wife or some other person, or deliver it himself. He chose to employ the wife for that purpose. If he had employed some other person, no question would be made in regard to whose agent the other person was, in the transaction. The relation of the wife, in carrying back the acceptance of her husband, to the transaction, is as manifest, as though that were all she had had to do in consummating the contract. If she had been with her husband, and the defendant had sent some other person with the proposition, and the husband had sent his acceptance by the wife, no one would question that she was the husband’s agent in accepting the offer. The confusion, if any, arises from the fact that she was the agent of both parties in making the contract, and from a failure to distinguish the point at which her agency for the defendant
II. There are two bills of exceptions in regard to the trustees, one holding both trustees chargeable, and the other holding the Rutland Savings Bank chargeable. They are not inconsistent, but the latter seems unnecessary. As there are no facts tending to show that Trustee Watson had any funds belonging to the defendant, we are led to conclude the judgment against him was an inadvertence. The same is reversed, and judgment rendered that he is- discharged with $3.00 costs as agreed. It is contended that the funds in the hands of the Rutland Savings Bank belonging to the defendant, are exempt from attachment by the trustee process. First, that they are exempt, being a debt accruing from a pension granted the defendant by the United States, by force of Sec. 4747 U. S. Rev. Stat., which reads: “No sum of money due, or to become due, to any pensioner, shall be liable to attachment, levy or seizure by or under any legal or equitable process whatever, whether the same remains with the pension office, or any officer or agent thereof, or is in the course of transmission to the pensioner entitled thereto, but shall inure wholly to the benefit of such pensioner.” This section does not purport to protect the money after it has inured wholly to the benefit of the pensioner, but to protect it while in the pension office, or in the hands of its agents or officers; and while in
Secondly, it is contended that the trustee cannot be holden by reason of Sec. 1076 R. L. That section is : ‘‘No person, except as herein otherwise provided; shall be liable or chargeable on trustee process, on account of a sum due or owing to the principal debtor for property sold and conveyed or delivered by him, which was at the time of sale exempt from attachment and execution. But so far as the principal debtor, at the time the trustee process was commenced was the owner of other property of the same kind as that sold by him to the person summoned as trustee, exempt from attachment and execution, so far as such other property was free from incumbrance for the purchase money thereof, the provisions of this section shall not apply.” This section was first enacted in 1865. Prior thereto for many years specific articles of property had been