FOR LOVE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2363, 8 June 1899, Page 55

FOR LOVE.

Frederick Adams had done a foolish thing, said the world that knew anything about him. He had "thrown away his chances and married a delicate, penniless girl, who had not even beauty to recommend her. She was all very well in her way, but he was better, and might have done well for himself," whatever that vague term implies. To crown his ill-judgment, he had " exiled himself from home and friends', and gone to live nobody knew where. Well, he would live to repent it ; he would tire of his wife and his folly together, and at test that the love of youth die.s out with youthful years." Frederick Adams and Bessie, his wife, thought otherwise, but kept their thoughts between them. . . . : Slowly, softly, Old Age placed his hands ! on their shoulders, and their backs became | slightly bowed ; he weaved his threads of silvery whiteness amid the black and gold and shaded in the lines where the smiles I had been. Slight Bessie was slighter on [ her 85th birthday than she was a year earlier, even to the aged eyes of Frederick. I She sat hour after hour in the arm-chair he had made for her 50 years before, and extracted again the JO3S fronf past days. It was the first midsummer day that a fire , had glowed on the parlour hearth, "but then none, surely, had been so chilly ! . . . I In the cottage bright fires glowed, to keep out the intense cold, and on his 91st birthday Frederick Adams, for the firsif time in his long life, slept with a fire on his bedroom hearth. ... It was past midnight, and the old man dreamed uneasily and made inarticulate speech. He was oppressed with a sense of suffocation, as though buried beneath the snow. There I was a strange hissing noise in his ears, such as he had often heard when, as a boy. he had fired a catherine-wheel. The noise woke him, and, with the vigour of youthful years, he sprang from the bed. The movement aroused Bessie. In a moment !he stooped over her : "It is love against 1 flames, wife," he said; "but be brave, for 1 Love must win." . . . Stripping a blanket from the bed, he wrapped it round her, and. placing beneath hei his aged arms — arms that in their strength 66 years before had borne her a delicate girl over the rugged mountains — he lifted her, and his j muscles became strong as the love that ! surged through him, and his feet swift as of yore. Taking in s long breath he bade Bessie do the same, and through the lurid leaping flames he dashed, and they "parted before him as he bore onwards his helpless I but inspiring burden. . j Frederick was clad only in his night dress, which the flames had singed ; but ; the garment was to him as plate-armour; he felt neither heat nor cold wliile his wife I was exposed to danger. "Bessie," said j Adams. " I'm going to get help ; be brave while I'm away. Three miles are soon travelled." Then, drawing the blanket about ! her, he tenderly placed her in a rough straw littered outbuilding behind the ruins [of their home. The poor, feeble, and naturally timid woman held his hand for a moment, and then he left her to start on that midnight journey of three miles. His legs and feet were bare, his body unprotected save by a flimsy night dress ; his head was uncovered, and the storm was mad, the cold intense, and his great age was an impediment to his swiftness. For himself he would have stayed in the shed for the night and sought help when the day broke ; but for her sake, that she might , not die before his eyes, he pushed on through the drifted snow aad in the teeth of the storih and the frost. 1 "God give me strength!" he cried, and toiled on, using his hands as feet and dragJ ging his numbed legs behind him. His old hands sank deep in the snow, and his knees made hollows at every move, and each yard covered was measured painfully. Raising ! his head and looking searchingly forward he ' fancied he descried at the- distance of 300 yds or less his neighbour's cottage. But how should he reach it? His wrists were in torture, his body racked, his legs stiff and numb. Then in a moment he" saw his wife, the love, of his life, dying, and alone, in ' the old wooden shed. Lying flat, with his ! face toward the ground, he propelled himj self along a few inches at a, time, and bleed- ' ing, exhausted, half dead, arrived at the cottage. Its inmates were asleep, but he roused them and told his tale. " Save hei," Ihe said ; " lend me clothes and take me i with you, the sight of strangers would^kill her." In vain they begged him to remain I in the house. " I cannot rest," he replied, " till I have seen her brought here in safety." j They dressed him and thawed him. He j could scarcely be persuaded tc taste food I and drink, but he asked that some might be j taken to her. A litter was put together 1 and the old man was borne on the shoulders of four, and, at a swinging pace, the three miles over which he had crawled so painI fully were covered. " Lift me from this," ' he said, "^he'd be troubled to see me so." And they lifted him out and assisted him to the shed. They struck a light and looked lin timidly, afraid of what they might see. I On the straw, in her blanket, lay Bessie 1 Adams, wmi white drawn face and closed eyes. " She is dead," whispered a man to , his fellow. Adams turned upon him fiercely. " Stand back," he said ; " you lie, she lives." His voice — that so familiar voice — unsealed the closed eyes and stirred the sluggish blood in the aged veins, and loosed the stiffening tongue, and, looking up at her kneeling husband, she said : "Frederick, Love

— Gentleman's Magazine