Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 March 1878 — A Martyr to Trust. [ARTICLE]

A Martyr to Trust.

In the little Village of Dexter, in Maine, there is a small savings institution in which the poor people living thereabout have been accustomed to put the hard earnings gathered by patient toil and laid by under a sacred trust against the time of need. The cashier of this bank was one J. W. Barron, i person unknown outside of the little community in which he lived. Last Friday, at a time when others were enjoying a holiday, he went to the bank to perform some duties of his office. W nile there he was attacked by burglars, who in some way had gained admission to the building. Refusing to open the safe, he was gagged and strangled time after time. Probably we cannot of the physical and mental torment that this man resisted. He knew that he faced death. He had on the one side a happy life, the responsibility for wife and child, the ties of family love, the consciousness, that jf he yielded men would extenuate an act forced from him by pain which few.

men have the fortitude to endure. On the other hand, there was (imply an idea, and that idea an abstraction called duty. But he saw that duty as plainly as most then see the substance of things. He resisted torment until his thwarted persecutors, incensed by his refusal, struck him Upon the head and threw him senseless into the vault, closed the doors and left him in the noisome air there, where his friends found him still insensible hours afterward, the rone with which he had been strangled still around his rasped and bruised neck. He was taken ont, and, without even recovering consciousness, he died. This is the plain but sublime story of a simple-minded martyr to duty. He was not one whose education and surroundings were those that led up to the character that we call heroic. His life had been among associations that were commonplace and almost humble. He was not one who had been used to the martial achievements of the camps, or who had felt the stirring call to bravery, which prompts the warrior to prowess on the battle-field. His deed was not one performed before the gaze of crowds, or one which was to be sung by poets or repeated by wondering philosophers. It was heroism in the dark, with only itself as a reward. Yet tested by the average of human weakness, or human strength, measured by the traits which distinguish moral courage from mere brute resistance, how it overcasts the best deeds of heroes whom historians have made immortal! How it is glorified by contrast with the stories of felonies compounded, of trusts betrayed, of reputations soiled which throw their shadows athwart our times! Above all, how it stands forth before our generation as at once an example of fidelity to duty which is to be imitated, and as a proof that the men of moral motives are the truly great and the truly good! Barron gave to duty all that he had when he gave his life. But he gave beside to his community and to nis race an example which, gathered up and covered, though it may be, in the harvest of the great deeds of humanity, will never be lost in the strengthening of the impulses which make human beings nobler and better. —N. Y. Evening Post.