Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 October 1875 — A Man Supposed Dead Returns After Five Years’ Absence. [ARTICLE]

A Man Supposed Dead Returns After Five Years’ Absence.

Five years ago Benj. S. Grosvenor lived in Dowagiac. In June, 1870, he left "home for the purpose of going to St. Jo to butcher. He did not return, and his wife could only learn that he got off the cars at Niles but did not reach St. Jo. She heard nothing of him until the following September, when in a huckleberry marsh near Buchanan a body was found so badly decomposed that the features were unrecognizable. Some of those who saw it were positive that it was Grosvenor, and sent to Dowagiac for his wife to come and view the body. She went down and was met at the depot by a dentist of Dowagiac who had seen it, and he told her that he was positive it was Grosvenor, as he recognized the teeth from some work he had performed on them. She went down to see the remains, and, though she could not positively identify them as her husband, all the indications looked that way, and a day or two after she wept over the grave of her husband, as she supposed. Not long after a son, who was lying very sick when the father went away, died also, leaving her with one child, a little girl. She left Dowagiac and came to this city, and is now cook in the Grand River House. From that time she lived a widow and believed herself such, though she says that there was always a presentiment on her mind that they had all been deceived and that her husband was still alive. But her friends were confident that he was no longer living, and as the years passed by without tidings of him she had to give up hope, and only at times would dpubts arise in her mind. Any doubt she might have felt was not shared by others and it was supposed that he had been murdered, and she has received a number of letters from de-' tectives—one from Europe—offering to ferret the mystery and bring the murderer to justice. She had some reason to hold to her doubts, for her husband, when absent before, had threatened to stay away till he had acquired a competence, but she did think that if he carried this threat into execution he would have written to her. Tuesday night at midnight a man got off the cars and presented himself before her. It was the lost husband. He had gone to Missouri and had been living there. He had not yet become rich but sot sick of the country and returned East. [is wife was so indignant at his leaving a sick family as he did 'and leaving her to work for herself, without letting her hear from him—though he says ire did write but the letter miscarried—that she gave him a reception more cool than that which is popularly supposed to b« the thing in such cases, and rather intimated that as she had got along very well without him for five years she could keep on doing so. This somewhat dismayed him and he went to see a brother hear Saginaw and is there still. —Jackson {Midi.) Fat riot. A letter from Wavnesburg, Pa., to the Allegheny Mail says: “On Nebow Ridge, in this county, about four miles from Jacktown and on the farm belonging to Henry Miller, there is what is called the 1 gas spring.’ This is probably the greatest curiosity in Pennsylvania. The water is cold, but bubbles and foams as if boiling, and the greatest wonder is the inevitable destruction of life produced by inhaling the gas. No living thing is to be found within a circuit of 100 yards of the spring. The very birds, if they happen to fly over it, drop dead. We experimented with a snake of the copperhead variety on its destructive properties by holding it a few feet above the water. It stretched dead in two minutes. It will kill a human being in twenty minutes. We stood over it about five minutes, when a dull, heavy, aching sensation crept over us, and our eyes began to swim. The gas which escapes here is of the rankest kind of carbonic acid.” A bad position: Imposition.