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Show HER HEART WAS TOUCHED AT LAST- An old woman died in a lone house on Croghan street Monday night. No one knew it untii yesterday, yester-day, when everything looked so grim and silent around the bouse that the door was burst in, and they found the old woman dead. She had lived there for years and years. People knew her, yet no one knew her. Homo called her "Old Nan," and some thought her a witch. She never left her yard, never spoke to any one except to snarl and growl, and a lone sailor drifting about on the ocean could not have been more distant from love and sympathy. She did not die in her bed. She might have been ill for three or four days, but she did not call eut and ask for assistance. Perhaps Bhe felt that her time had come and that no human hand could aid her, and as Bhe felt the weight of its shadow she was a woman again. There were longings in her heart, now feelings in her soul, and no one can say that she did not weep. She crept off the bed, made her way to an old chest, and from its depths she pulled up an old and tattered testament. Between its leaves were two cards. On one was pinned a lock of hair, tied with a laded ribbon a lrown, curly lock, such as you might clip from the head of a boy of five. In a quaint old hand was written on a card the words: "My Jamie's hair." On the other card was pinned three or four violets, so old and faded that they looked like paper. She sat in a chair, holding the book in her lap, and her stiffened fingers held those cards up to her blind eyes. Thus they found her a card in either hand and the holy book lyiug open in her lap I The men, women and children who had crowded in with the officer saw how it was, and some of them wept. She must have been a mother once and had a mother's tender feeling. No doubt she was loved and happy when she severed that curl from its mates and wrote an the card: "My boy Jamie's hair!" They removed the precious relics very tenderly, and when they came to look into the face they -taw that it almost wore a smile, and that the hard lines had all been rubbed out by the tenderness which flowed into her heart as death was laying its hand upon her. Who culled those violets? Where is Jamie? Truly, the greatest mystery of life is life. Detroit Free Press. |