Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1889 — How He Broke the News. [ARTICLE]

How He Broke the News.

Lincoln (Neb.)Journal. ■ * You say that I am pale and.flustered, and shivering in my shoes; I’ll be hanged if you wouldn’t shiver if you had to “break the news.'’ I suppose you have heard how Quimby is stretched on a bunk down there, with a pint or more of bis own blood mixed up with his auburn hair? Well, they made me a Joint Committee to go to his house and fell his wife all about the scrimmage, and what to her man befell. I went to the house

up yonder, not mashed on the job, yon bet, and my classic and blue-veined forehead was bathed in a quart of sweat The woman was in the kitchen,a singing a plaintive song, but dried up when she saw me, for she knew there Was something wrong. When I coughed and I hemmed and stammered f and “madam,” said I, “be brave! your husband is now a-lying—” Oh, Lord! what a shriek she gave! And she walked up and down a'moaning and wringing her furrowed hands, and her hair fell ddwn like sea weed adrift by the ocean sands. “Oh, heaven,” she cried, “soy husband! They’ve taken my love from ine,” and the way that she reeled and staggered was a sight for a man to see; “so brave, so kind and so noblel 80 loving, so grand and strong, an<? now must I wait his coming in vain all the dark day long! and his children wilj. wail in sorrow and never again in glee troop down in the misty twilight and cluster about his knee.” And so she went on a-raving, her screams for a block were heard, and I like a graven image stood there without saying a word. It seeined like my tongue was frozen or glued to my pearly teeth, and hardly a breath came upward from the paralyzed lungi beneath. But I braced up all of a sudden, and “Mad am,” said I again, “I’m sorry—l’m deuced sorry—to have caused you this needless pain; let up on your frenzied screaming; you don’t need to weep and wail, your old man ain’t dead by along shot; he’s only locked up in jail.” She glared at me for a minute or two, then she said: “So the darned old loafer is down there in jail again?” Then she picked up a tub and smashed it over my princely head, and I saw she was getting ready to paint the landscape red. So I skipped through the gate and moseyed so fast that I tore my shoes; and they don’t make me a committee in the future to “break’the news.”