t, for, he declares,
if there _is_ such a thing _as_ a similitude to the kingdom o' Heaven
_in_ a hotel, why, it's in the providential supply department which, in
a manner, hangs to his belt. He always humors a joke--'specially on
himself."

No one will ever know through what painful periods of unrequited longing
the Widow Morris had sought solace in this, her only cherished "relic,"
after the "half hour of sky-works" which had made her, in her own
vernacular, "a lonely, conflagrated widow, with a heart full of ashes,"
before the glad moment when it was given her to discern in it an
unsuspected and novel value. First had come, as a faint gleam of
comfort, the reflection that although her dear lost one was not in
evidence in the picture, he had really been inside the building when the
photograph was taken, and so, of course, _he must be in there yet_!

At first she experienced a slight disappointment that her man was not
visible, at door or window. But it was only a passing regret. It was
really better to feel him surely and broadly within--at large in the
great house, free to pass at will from one room to another. To have had
him fixed, no matter how effectively, would have been a limitation. As
it was, she pressed the picture to her bosom as she wondered if,
perchance, he would not some day come out of his hiding to meet her.

It was a muffled pleasure and tremulously entertained at first, but the
very whimsicality of it was an appeal to her sensitized imagination, and
so, when finally the thing did really happen, it is small wonder that it
came somewhat as a shock.

It appears that one day, feeling particularly lonely and forlorn, and
having no other comfort, she was pressing her tear-stained face against
the row of window-shutters in the room without awnings, this being her
nearest approach to the alleged occupant's bosom, when she was suddenly
startled by a peculiar swishing sound, as of wind-blown rain, whereupon
she lifted her face to perceive that it was indeed raining, and then,
glancing back at the photograph, she distinctly saw her husband rushing
from one window to another, drawing down the sashes on the side of the
house that would have been exposed to the real shower whose music was in
her ears.

This was a great discovery, and, naturally enough, it set her weeping,
for, she sobbed, it made her feel, for a minute, that she had lost her
widowhood and that, after the shower, he'd be coming home.

It mi