Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1876 — A Romance of Chicago. [ARTICLE]

A Romance of Chicago.

Yesterday evening a pale, thin woman, meanly clad, was seen shivering on the doorstep of a fashionable mansion on Ashland avenue. Her whole appearance betokened poverty and misery. The master of the house, a comparatively young man, clad in a costly fur overcoat, ran up the steps at the same moment and gave the poor creature a quarter, which she received with profuse manifestations of gratitude. It seems romantic, but it is a fact that eleven years ago that young woman lived in that same mansion, the beautiful, accomplished and idolized daughter of wealthv parents. Two suitors sought her hand—one was a fashionable young man, the other the plumber’s apprentice, who, while visiting her father’s lordly mansion to thaw out the water-pipes, saw and loved the beautiful apparition. He preferred his suit in a blunt, manly style, told her that his time would soon be out, and showed her how the bills were made out to meet her objection as W. Iris lack of fortune. The naughty and infatuated girl rejected his suit and married the handsome young man, with whom she set up housekeeping in the costly mansion on Ashland avenue. Wonderful are the alternations of for-i tune! The plumber rows steadily, became wealthy, and purchased the family mansion when the young husband was compelled, through going short on No. two spring at an mopportune moment, to sell out his property. The young husoand took to drink, and finally was buried in a pauper’s grave, and last e’vening his starving widow asked and received alms on the doorstep of a house formerly her own, from the hands ot’ her discarded plumberlover, now its owner and a millionaire.— Chicago Tribune,