CONSOLING THE WIDOW.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 308, 14 March 1879, Page 17

CONSOLING THE WIDOW.

An elderly man with peaked features, large, watery eyes, and an attire of dilipidated respectabily, 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. Ho' sat down at the kitchen table, with his 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, "lwas sure of it." "Father? nfother ? sister t brother f ' he asked, taking up a piec? of meat with one hand, and slapping it appetfaingly upon a piece of bread in the other. "My husband, sir," she said, drawing *out a handkerchief, while her lips quivered. She looked so whjte and sad and drooping as she sat there, that his heart was touched. • " Did ho 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 a comfort in that." He slapped another piece of* meat upon another piece of bread, and quietly put his teeth through them. 4> You know," he presently added, "it might have bsen 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 saw-mill," said the stranger, taking another bito of 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 bandaged, ever return to your agonised sight. 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 j that things werc v as they were instead of as they might have baen. I " He might have perished in fire, and been dug out of the ruins -next I 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 agonisingly protested against his proceeding. " You'll admit it might have b2en worse ?" he asked, exploring his under jaw with a 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 that a natural death is not a thing to depise in these times of rush, crush, and splutter, and if you have learned the lesson my mission is accomplished, and Igo ray way. I don't want to intrude, of course, on the privacy of deep grief, but if the deceased was about my build, and left' behind a vest, not too gaudy in pattern, T should t>3 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 by his vestures." When he went away he had a souvenir of departed worth. — Danbury Nors,