Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 May 1878 — PERSONAL AND LITERARY. [ARTICLE]

PERSONAL AND LITERARY.

—The heirs of Brigham Young brought a restraining suit too late, and the executors have restored to the Church property of the estate valued at from $500,000 to $750,000. An examination of the books has been going on since Young’s death, and it snows that he was in debt to the Church about $1,000,000, which is almost the full value of his property. —When Spencer, the defaulter, ran away from Chicago, he left a locked box supposed to contain much treasure This mysterious depository was broken open in court the other day, and was found to contain “ a copy of Capt. William Morgan’s celebratea exposure of Masonry, undated, but yellow with age.” And then his creditors felt better. — N. Y. Graphic. —“Gen. O. O. Howard,” a Portland (Ore.) correspondent of the Boston Journal writes, “is marvellously popular with the people. He is known as the praying General. He is one of the most earnest Christian men on the coast. His religious flag is never struck; that floats everywhere. In church work, in Christian association, in the Sunday-Schools, in the odd, wayside labor of missions, he is foremost. On board the steamer he was the life of the company; cheery, genial, unselfish, he made friends with all. On Sunday he arranged Divine service, led the singing and aided the preacher in his part. Hi# personal bravery and courage is admitted by his enemies.” —Senator Withers, of Virginia, displayed wonderful nerve duringa recent operation, when the surgeons had to cut into the inside of the pupil of the eye and remove from it a particle of diseased matter. He absolutely refused to take morphine or any other anesthetic, and, lying on a sofa with his head propped up to allow the surgeons to reach his eye readily, submitted himself to the shock with entire composure. Mr. Withers not only did not utter a sound under the knife, but did not once wince or give any other evidence of feeling pain. The exhibition of nerve and power of will was wonderful, and the best results foHowed. The operation was more successful than if the patient had been subjected to the influence of anesthetics.

—Tom Placide’s widow died at Tom’# River, N. J., recently, aged eighty-three. Fifty-three years ago Placide fell in love with her, but Mary Ann Knight, who was ten years his senior, did-pot encourage his suit and married another man. In 1868 her old lover met her, then a widow, renewed the courtship of forty years before, and this time was successful. After their marriage they went to Tom’s River to live, he having retired from the stage. Their home was a beautiful place, and they are said to have lived very happily together. In July last Placide committed suicide by shooting himself. He had suffered protracted agony from a cancer in his mouth, and, in a letter written just before the deed, he explained that he could endure no more. Mrs. Placide was prostrated by his death, and her health thereafter steadily declined. Strawberry short cake is so called because it is short of strawberries.

In a shabby little house, in a shabby little street—l call it a street simply out of compliment, it being in reality only an alley that had started out to be a street and finding itself too narrow by half hud stopped at the end of two blocks and never gone any further—lived a shabby old man, called by his neighbors “Mr. Waste Paper,” and by the rude boys and girls of the neighbor'hood “Old Miser” and “Queer Ejfcs.” He bought and sold waste paper, and all the four roomsjn his house —he was. tho only one in the street that occupied a whole house and was looked upon with great respect on that account; in fact, I think if he had only rented a room or two like the rest of the inhabitants he would have been “Waste Paper John,” instead of “ Mr. Waste Paper”—were almost idled with it. One, indeed, the largest, was tilled to the very ceiling, only a narrow pathway being left In the center like a small valley between two steep mountains. A deep drift like snow lay upon the floors of two of the other rooms, and hundreds of books from which the covers had departed forever, old magazines, used up ledgers, torn handbills and circulars, were stacked along the walls, and in tho fourth room, where tiie old man ate and slept, all the furniture, with the exception of a tiny stove, a gridiron, a saucepan and a tea-kettle, was made of paper. Ottomans formed out of newspapers laid neatly one upon tho other, a bed built of some twenty large bundles of coarse brown paper, with an old Webster’s Unabridged” for a pillow; a table made by placing six big account books on tho floor, six more on the top of them, and so on until enough had been used. All legless, of course, but serving Mr. Waste Paper as well as though they had any number of legs. You never saw such a queer place in your life, and never heard such a continual rustling and crackling as the furniture kept up, and very likely you never met such a very odd old man. One shoulder was a little higher and one leg a little shorter than tho other, and he had one black eye and one bluo one. And when he was good-natured he looked at you with the blue one, and when he was cross ho looked at you with the black -one, and I don’t think there could ever have been two more expressive eyes in the whole worldone could look so cross and the other so kind. Well, nobody in Sam street—that is what they called the ambitious alley, after old Sam Junkman, who built the first house there fifty years ago—knew anything about Mr. Waste Paper, ex ceptthat he had lived in that fourroomed house for the last ten yoars and that the only person he was at all friendly with was Mrs. Dolf, tho kidglove cleaner, who lived next door, and who boiled the water for his tea on summer evenings, when ho had no fire at home. Mrs. Dolf s children, Amos' and Cherry, liked tho old man very, well, for lib used often to give them pretty pictures which he cut from thS picture-pa-pers which fell into his possession, and more rarely a penny or two; but the other Sam-street children called him “ old miser,” because he gave them nothing and because they heard their fathers and mothers say, “ Waste Paper has' a good sum of money in some bank or other you may bet, for he’s been buying and selling for ten years and never had a day’s sickness, and wearing the same old clothes, summer and winter, and not a chick or a child, or a dog or a cat to look after, and never asking anybody to have a drop of beer or a pipe of ’baccy. He’s a reg'lar old miser, that’s what he is.” But the old man paid no attention to the rude bews tyid girls, exceptto turn his black eye on them once in a while when they became too annoying, but passed his time when at home reading something from his Btock in trade, or, with eyes half-closed, in deep thought about what no one but himself ever knew, when one bright, warm May day, he came slowly into his living-room from the street, carrying a heavy bag on his shoulder. He placed the bag upon a paper ottoman, sat down on the paper bed beside the paper table, wiped his- face with a paper handkerchief, and then opened the bag and tumbled the contents out upon the paper carpet He had bought them that morning of a school teacher who lived at the other end of the town, four miles away, and they consisted of soiled copy-books, old frammars, geographies, arithmetics, istories, readers, with as many dog’sears as would * have supplied several large dog families, old reports and old compositions, each of the latter rolled up neatly by itself and tied with a bit .. of pink ribbon. As the old man 1 took two or three of

these compositions from the pile before him, he began to talk to himself, as people who live a lonely life are sometimes in the habit of doing. “ AlLthese long years,” he said, “and I have never found anything oi value. No wills, no bank mftes, no trace of rqy lost family—nothing that people in my business aro always finding in stories,” sod as he said this his black eye IVII upon a namp written in a child’s straggling hand on the back of one of Ihu papers he held—“ Ruth Sands Morris," 'and underneath, in the teacher’s writing, “ Very good, indeed, for a little girl of ten.” Thp old man hastily untied the ribbon with trembling hands, find with astrange light breaking over his wrinkled face, unrolled the paper and, turning his blue eye upon it, began to read. And this is what he read:

“ A BTOKY. “Some girls— most girls—well anyhow a good many girls—do not like to write compositions. I do. “When I grow up I hope to be an arthur and writes stories and perhaps pomes for all the great maggiezines and papers and some day may bo a whole book. “ My mama says my grandfather the one I nave never'seen, was very fond cf literaychure. “ Literaychure means things that are made up out of peoples’ head and then printed. Ido not mean all peoples heads for hundreds and hundreds have not that kind of head, but smart peoples’ heads. “ He used to oe always talking rimes and it is about him my story is to be. He was a very good man, but very funny. Not the funny to make folks laugh, but the other funny. lie had ono black eye and one blue one, and he was always falling into a referee. Referees are when yon think so hard you do not know anything at all. Well, when my mamma was a little girl, littler than me, her father—that is my grandfather, of course—went ono day to sec a old friend of his off to a foren country, and after he said good-bye to hia friend in the cabin ho went up on deck and fell into a awful referee and the ship carried him off, too.

“There was a dreadful time when he did not come home, and grandma shut up the bookstore —he kept a secondhand bookstore—for three whole days and nights, and then she could not get along that way, so she opened it again. In a long time they got a letter from Grandfather Sands, and it begun: ‘Oh! do not be distressed for me, against my will born off to sea, for I think good luck will come of it,’ and the rest was that he was in Ostrayler and was going to stay there a year or so, until he made a lot of money, ’cause there was lots of money there and monkeys and parrots, I wish I had one, and savages. “ Grandma sent a answer, but she never got a letter from him again. And then after live years some one came back from there and said the savages had killed liim. Savages do not care for rimes and literaychure. And grandmother sold all her books and furniture cept some feather-beds and went to America —we lived in England first —no I did not for I was not on earth yet not till a good while after but the other remembers of the family did. And my mamma grew up here to be a lovely maiden and gpt married, but she was not very happy for somebody drank. It is a awful thing to drink. 1 do not mean tea, or coffee, or lemonade, or milk, or likeris water, or plain water but other things and 1 often wish the savages had let grandfather alone and then he would have come home and mama would have married some other person and would not have been a desolate widow with two girls and one boy “[The end or finis.]” The moment the old man had finished reading this s.tory ho seized his hat, Hung it upon his head and rushed into Mrs. Dolfs—tho kid glove cleaner—without even stopping to knock at the door, which was suclTan unusual thing for him to do that Mrs. Dolf started up from her work in the greatest astonishment, dropping the bottle she was holding in one hand on the iloor, where it broke.arid made the room smell likewell, two hundred pairs of cleaned kid gloves. “Where does—if you please, ma’am —Mr. Dolf buy his clothes?” asked he. “Great grief! what has happened? Can it be possible that tho old fellow is going to buy some new clothes for himself?” said Mrs. Dolf to herself, and

then she answered outloud, ‘ ■ Helrasift bought any for a year or so, Mr. Waste Paper, but when he does buy ’em he goes to Mr. Lucky’s, right around the next corner, two blocks down. Lucky’s dead now, and ‘ Cutter & Son’ bavo the place.” - “Thank you, ma’am,” said Mr. Waste Paper, throwing two bright silver quarters into the lap of little Cherry, who was sitting on the door-sill, with her kitten in ner arms, and hurrying away. And the old man, dressed in a now gray suit and a nice straw hat, who called that afternoon, first on Mrs. Abeooy, the schoolmistress, where lie obtained the address of Ruth Sands Morris, who had left school a year before to live in the Village of Wildrose, not very far away, at the “Safeandsure Savings Bank,” where he drew out a thousand ’dollars in brand-new bank notes didn’t look much like Mr. Waste Paper, bnt it was he all the same.

The next morning Mrs. Morris, the pretty widow who lived in the one-and-a-half-story cottage by the woods, in the Village of Wudrosc. was hanging up the clothes she had just finished washing, in the back garden, when the train from the big city over the river came dashing along, stopped at Wildrose Station, and left one passenger, an odd-looking, but nice-looking old man behind it, when it daahcjl away again. Grandmother Sands stood behind her young girl, as pretty as her mother, was scattering some corn among the chickens and singing “ Up in the Morning Early.” “ Dear me,” said the widow, taking a clothes-pin from her mouth to say it, “it almost breaks my heart to leave this place. We’ve been so happy here for the last year.” “ They may not find a purchaser for the house,” said grandmother. “ Oh! yes they will. They are sure to find. one. I Wish I had eight hundred dollars, i’d bought it in a moment, then we could have a hqmefforever; but there’s no use wishing. T never have more than eight hundred cents at a time jiowadays, and she stopped her mouth again with another clothes pin. “My dear,” said a voice directly behind them and they all turned to see an old man, who had come out of the woods so silently they had never heard his footsteps, leaning over the fence, and gazing upon them with a mild, blue eye, “ wouldn’t it be funny If I gave you the raoneyP” Grandmother Sands dropped the

clothes-pin bag—tho pretty widow nearly choked herself with the olothos-pin she had between her teeth, and her pretty daughter, her song suddenly ended, stood with one hand held out toward the ohiokens and her mouth wide open. “Don’t you know mo, SallieP” said the old man, “I should have known you anywhere though I haven’t seen you for many long, long years,” and ho slowly turned his black eye and tbflii both eyes upon her, and opened tho gate and came in. "Husband!” shrieked the grandmother. ' ‘‘“Father!” cried the daughter. “Grandfather! Hurrah!” shouted Ruth. —Margaret Eytinge, in Detroit Free Press.