Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1874 — A Love Story Told by Mr. Beecher. [ARTICLE]

A Love Story Told by Mr. Beecher.

Tom was a strapping, healthy boy, with a great appetite. He lived up in the mountains among the charcoal-burners until he was nineteen. Then he went down into the valley and hired out to a farmer. Tom was a scullion and a drudge, and at first the farmer hesitated to trust even the hogs to his care. But there was a glimmering of something in him that showed just a little through his uncouthness. After a year or two he became a full farm laborer—a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, powerful fellow, who made himself clumsily useful. Well, about that time the farmer’s daughter came home from school. What a revelation she was to Tom. He never knew until then what it was to worship anything, nor how awkward and coarse he was. He would have given all he had, which wasn’t much, to learn how to get into a room without hitting the door, or what to do with his hands, or how to sit down right. He began to change his clothes for better ones when he came in from the day’s work, and there was about him the dawning of improvement Finally the great day came. He stood trembling before the farmer’s daughter, the hard word was spoken, and she didn’t* repulse him. I think there is nothing in the life of a man which so rouses and stirs him as love. Tom went to the wrestling matches, and what a’vim there was in him. He read, he went to church, he wanted to see how people acted. And when after a good life he grew to be an old man, and talked in a trembling voice to his grandchildren, he used to say, “Oh, what a wife she was to me. Whatever I became she made me.” The world is full of just such instances of blessed influence. Nm» York Sun. —There is nothing so helpfUl to a man, and especially to a farmer, as a thrifty housewife. His wife may be beautiful and loving and accomplished', graceful, >■. cheerful, faithful, still he will find there are many flaws in the domestic economy unless, with her other qualifications, she combines the happy faculty of imparting the glow pf youth to the aged fowl and of so proportioning expound of butter to a barrel of salt as will enable her to realize for the salt in the market twenty-five cents per pound.— Bruntutiektr. Thk privilege of the peerage recently * saved the Earl of Winchester from being sent to prison for debt, at the suit of a London firm.