Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1885 — Crystabel’s Chestnut Cry. [ARTICLE]

Crystabel’s Chestnut Cry.

Crystabel Pendennis, with hot alkaline tears on her damascus cheeks, rushed into her mother’s arms and frantically embraced the mantel, and called for a poultice of tea-leaves for her aching and wounded orbs. A red sunset glinted on the western fog, and deep, dark tar-flat-like shadows spread across the three-ply Brussels. Then she tore the chesnut from her pocket—the cbestuut which since early childhood she had carried to prevent rheumatism—and threw it into the rosy, rubicund grate, and lifted the red-and-yellow chamois-and-flannel waistcoat from her dimpled shoulders, and pre-

pared to die of consumption. In vain her mother appealed to her, in the name of bric-a-brac, to reveal her sorrow. But at last she dried her Oolong tears, and said: “My sister, the beautiful but dreaded Irene, has fled with the coachman.” “But why do you weep, Crystabel ?” “Because, mamma, 1 was engaged to fly with him myself, only she stole my stockings and I couldn’t get hers on.”— San Francisco Post.