Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 October 1875 — Ever Been There? [ARTICLE]

Ever Been There?

You have never really seen a picture of despair, and utter misery, and sore distress and amazement, unless you have seen a man, standing in the presence of the wife of his bosom, and of the other members of his family, and reaching info his pocket to hand her a letter that he had got out of the Postoffice for her, bring out of the recesses of that inside pocket a crumpled, rumpled, creased envelope, once white, but now looking as though it had associated with cigars for many a long day, the very identical letter which she had written to her mother or some dear, dear friend six weeks ago and given her perfidious husband to mail. The very letter that he had sworn a thousand times he had mailed, and even related a little joke that Postmaster Sunderland got off about it, in or„der to prove that he had handed it to the Government in person. And there it is in the unhappy husband’s guilty hand, and liis wife’s eyes start from their spheres as she gazes upon the well-remembered, although cigar-stained, address. She does not scold; not she, the angel. She does not swear, as her husband would do in hes case, and as he does in his own mentally. She does not get up and kick over the piano stool and drown the trembling caitiff in a torrent of talk. She only looks at the letter and then at the man and says: “Well!” And that man would rather be swore at for a straight month than have that “well” dropped on him. It crushes him like a pile-driver. There are probably about 4,000 ways of saying well, but only a woman can say it with the accent which belongs .ta it under these circumstances. And the wretched man starts to say about 150 things and dbesn’t finish one of them. He feels that he has given hiniself away, to be sure. He would like the ground to open and swallow him up, but the ground appears to enjoy the play too well to spoil it by taking away one of the stars. No living man knows how the tableau ends, because no living man has the nerve to go through such a scene and keep his senses sufficiently about him to recollect anything about it after that “well!” is shot athim. But it is a matter of record that the man mopes about and cuts a cord of kindling wood, and fixes that kitchen shutter, and carries in all the house-plants and counts them to see how many brackets will be needed ■in that bay-window, and he puts up the hanging-baskets aud fastens the loose shelf in the pantry, and sets the mouse-trap, and carries m stove-wood enough to last a month, and tries to talk gossip, and says he’ll have Daubs come around in the morning and grain the front door, and he tries to be as good as he knows how, and finally, declaring that he is not sleepy, he sits up until alter one o’clock, and dreads going to bed worse than the late Mr. Rogers dreaded going to the stake, and when he does go, in tear and trembling, he finds his deceived wife’s eyes open so wide and tight that you couldn’t shut them with a monkey-wrench. And here we drop the veil over the dreadful scene.— Burlington Hawk-Eye.

—A Boston man, somewhat accustomed to missionary labor, recently called on an aged woman who was oil her death-bed, and, after speaking in suitable terms, was surprised by the rejoinder: “ I heard that you w'ere at the door and wanted to see you a moment. lam too weak to talk or to listen. I cannot ask you to pray with me, but can vou tell me if the pany is going to pay any dividend this year?” The interview was not prolonged. —Springfield (Mass.) Republican. | —Dr. Cressy, of Amherst, Mass., has returned from a professional visit to the epizootic region in Connecticut, where the disease is more-violent than in this State.. The doctor recommends careful treatment an/ a general regard to the hygiene of tine horse rather than violent dosing.— Springfield (Mass.) Republican .