University of Virginia Library

THE SYMPATHIZING STRANGER.

AN elderly man with peaked features, large watery eyes, and an attire of dilapidated respectability, called at a Danbury house last Friday morning for a "lunch." He said he was travelling from Boston to Buffalo, at which latter place he had

great expectations. He sat down at the kitchen-table, with his long legs coiled up under it, and his long arms spread out upon it, while his ponderous nose stood out like a grease-spot on a pair of white pants.

The woman of the house brought him a plate of bread and meat, and a bowl of coffee. While she was placing the things he noticed that she wore a black dress, and a look of pallor.

"Had a death, madam?" he softly inquired as he squared himself for the repast.

"Yes, sir."

"Lately?"

"Last Tuesday," she answered faintly.

"I was sure of it. Father? mother? sister? brother?" he asked, taking up a piece of meat with one hand, and slapping it appetitely upon a piece of bread in the other.

"My husband, sir," she said, drawing out a handkerchief, while her lips quivered. She looked so white and sad and drooping as she sat there, that his heart was touched.

"Did he die a natural death?" he asked, softly chewing on the food, and bending the full glance of his large eyes upon her.

"Yes, sir."

"It's a bad thing in one so young as you to lose her protector. But he died a natural death; and there is comfort in that." He slapped another

piece of meat upon another piece of bread, and quietly put his teeth through them.

"You know," he presently added, revolving the morsel in his mouth, and assuming an appearance of delicate cheerfulness, "that he died calmly, with every want attended to, and loving hands to administer to him. Could I trouble you for a little mustard?" She weariedly arose, and got him the article. "There's comfort in that, isn't there?" he continued, referring to the passing-away of the deceased.

"Yes," she said in a low tone, wiping her eyes.

"Now you know," he said, looking intently at her with his eyes, while his hands spread the mustard, "it might have been much different and far worse. He might have been run over by a train of coal-cars, and cut into pound lumps stuck full of gravel?"

"I know," said she with a shiver.

"Then, again, he might have been blown up in a defective sawmill," said the stranger, taking another bite of the food, and gently closing his eyes, as if the better to picture the irredeemable horror of this proposition, "and only about two-thirds of him, and that badly damaged, ever returned to your agonized sight."

A low sob behind the handkerchief was the only response, while he opened his eyes in time to detect a fly making extraordinary efforts to shake its

hind-legs free from the mustard. Coming mechanically to the assistance of the insect, he said,—

"It is bad enough to lose him, I'll admit that. No one would be so calloused as to deny that," he said, looking around inquiringly, as if to make quite sure that no such a party was in sight. "Still it could have been much worse, you know. He might have been prematurely perforated with the ramrod of a cannon, and had to have had chloroform injected in him at an expense of twenty-five dollars a day. This would have been dreadful. But if he'd fallen into a vat of hot oil, and had all his flesh peeled off, you'd never got over it, would you?"

"No, sir," said she, burying her face still deeper in her handkerchief.

"Oh! there are a hundred ways he might have died," he went on, taking a sweep with the knife at a fly, in the exuberance of his delight that things were as they were, instead of as they might have been. "He might have perished in a fire, and been dug out of the ruins the next day with a pickaxe. He might have fallen off a two-story building, and struck on his face, and had to have gone through the funeral on his stomach, with weeping friends pressing the last fond kiss on the back of his head."

Here the narrator shuddered himself at the awful prospect of such a catastrophe, while the bereaved woman agonizingly protested against his proceeding.

"You'll admit it might have been worse?" he asked with undisguised anxiety.

"Oh, yes, sir!" she replied, wiping her eyes.

"I'm glad of that," said he, exploring his under jaw with the fork. "Afflictions will come; but if we try to think of those which are greater that have not come to us, then we are better able to bear those that do. It's been my object to teach you that a natural death is not a thing to despise in these times of rush, crash, and sputter; and, if you have learned the lesson, my mission is accomplished, and I go my way. I don't want to intrude, of course, on the privacy of a deep grief; but if the deceased was about my build, and left behind a vest not too gaudy in pattern, I should be pleased to take it along with me as a souvenir of departed worth." He paused an instant, and then added with touching solemnity, "These were his victuals; and it would seem appropriate as well as beautiful to have them held in by his vestures."

When he went away, he had as a souvenir of departed worth something he could pull down if required so to do.