ate partings and penitent reunions--the
old story of love dying a lingering yet violent death. On the fatal
morning I met him on Washington street. I noticed his manner was hurried
and his look peculiar, as I gave him the usual salutation and a hearty
grasp of the hand. As be moved away, I looked after him with mingled
admiration and pity, until his faultless figure turned the corner and
disappeared.

Ten minutes afterward he lay on the floor of his room dead, with a
bullet through his brain, his hair dabbled in blood. At the
funeral-service, in the little church on Pine street, strong men bowed
their heads and sobbed. His wife sat on a front seat, pale as marble and
as motionless, her lips compressed as with inward pain; but I saw no
tears on the beautiful face. At the grave the body had been lowered to
its resting-place, and all being ready, the attendants standing with
uncovered heads, I was just about to begin the reading of the solemn
words of the burial service, when a tall, blue-eyed man with gray
side-whiskers pushed his way to the head of the grave, and in a voice
choked with passion, exclaimed:

"There lies as noble a gentleman as ever breathed, and he owes his death
to that fiend!" pointing his finger at the wife, who stood pale and
silent looking down into the grave.

She gave him a look that I shall never forget, and the large steely-blue
eyes flashed fire, but she spoke no word. I spoke:

"Whatever maybe your feelings, or whatever the occasion for them, you
degrade yourself by such an exhibition of them here."

"That is so, sir; excuse me, my feelings overcame me," he said, and
retiring a few steps, he leaned upon a branch of a scrub-oak and sobbed
like a child.

The farce and the tragedy of real life were here exhibited on another
occasion. Among my acquaintances in the city were a man and his wife who
were singularly mismatched. He was a plain, unlettered, devout man, who
in a prayer-meeting or class-meeting talked with a simple-hearted
earnestness that always produced a happy effect.

She was a cultured woman, ambitious and worldly, and so fine-looking
that in her youth she must have been a beauty and a belle. They lived in
different worlds, and grew wider apart as time passed by--he giving
himself to religion, she giving herself to the world. In the gay city
circles in which she moved she was a little ashamed of the quiet, humble
old man, and he did not feel at home among them. There was no for