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Show AA STRANGE TALE. A soldier who was supposed to have been killed returns home. We are going to tell a true story about a man whose bones have reposed under a pretty little mound at the Greentown Cemetery, Ohio, for sixteen years or more, but who, in spite of this trifling obstacle, turned up on the streets of Akron a few days since to greet his friends of two decades ago. Frank Wise is the name of this interesting personage, and the suns of full thirty-seven summers have done well their work in bronzing his weather-beaten countenance. He is of medium height, built on the Tanner plan (a circumstance which proved his salvation, as will appear from the narrative), and has every appearance of a man who has "seen life" in every phase and is happy in "roughing it." In 1862 he enlisted as one of the one-hundred-days' men, went to the front, was taken sick, went to the hospital, finally died, and was sent home a corpse to his grief stricken family at Greentown. Owing to the long time which had elapsed since death the coffin was not opened, but funeral services were held, a discourse pronounced before a large concourse of weeping friends, and the body deposited in its last resting place in the family burying ground. Sixteen years elapsed, and, presto! the corpse, in a remarkable state of preservation, and conducting himself very much as live men ordinarily do, walks into the auction rooms of Carey Wright two weeks ago, and asks Mrs. Wright if she knows him. "I am Frank Wise, your cousin," was the greeting of this healthy looking spectre. The voice, the name and the countenance did not belie the speaker's word. Mrs. Wright recognised him immediately as a Wise from tip to toe. In the first few moments of recognition words came thick and fast on both sides. But between breaths the stranger managed to tell how he read the account of his funeral in the Canton papers, which found their way into camp; how he hadn't died, but got well, how, when he read that he was dead, he "concluded to let it go at that" and how, on leaving the army he shipped on a Chinese trader, and had knocked around as a sailor, trader, voyager, customs clerk, and what not for fifteen years. He had been to China, Japan, Feejee [Fiji] Islands, Scotland, England, Spain-in fact, he had seen the whole big world. At one time he was employed as a clerk in a Spanish custom house, this being his last venture before returning. While coasting around the ?? in the early part of his career he was taken by the cannibals, and momentarily expected to be converted into a toothsome morsel for the rapacious maw of the festive man eater. His leanness was all that saved him, and he was contemptuously set aside for a more juicy victim. His arms bear the American coat-of-arms in tattoo, and on his back is an excellent representation in India ink of the ill-fated ship "Pilgrim," which was burned some years ago. "Why didn't you write to your folks?" decried Mrs. Wright, after listening to the wanderer's tale for nearly an hour. "Why, none of them wrote to me," was the answer. "Well, how could you expect them to write when they had buried you and supposed you were dead?" This was a sort of stunner. In fact the pilgrim had not thought of it in that way and didn't attempt to answer. With the restlessness that prompted all his wanderings, he excused himself, after an all too brief talk with Mrs. Wright, and promised to drop in again in a day or two and "talk everybody tired" with the tale of his wanderings. He took his leave, saying that he wanted to go down to Greentown to see his brother. He and another brother living in Indiana, and two sisters in Ohio are the surviving members of the family, the mother dying shortly after the burial of her supposed son. |