for help.
“What do you suppose the gentleman did? But you would not guess in
twenty years. He took out a handful of gold coin and told me to help
myself–freely. That is what he did.”
The next morning the lieutenant told me his new letter of credit had
arrived in the night, so we strolled to Cook’s to draw money to pay back
the benefactor with. We got it, and then went strolling through the
great arcade. Presently he said, “Yonder they are; come and be
introduced.” I was introduced to the parents and the young ladies; then
we separated, and I never saw him or them any m—
“Here we are at Farmington,” said Twichell, interrupting.
We left the trolley-car and tramped through the mud a hundred yards or so
to the school, talking about the time we and Warner walked out there
years ago, and the pleasant time we had.
We had a visit with my niece in the parlor, then started for the trolley
again. Outside the house we encountered a double rank of twenty or
thirty of Miss Porter’s young ladies arriving from a walk, and we stood
aside, ostensibly to let them have room to file past, but really to look
at them. Presently one of them stepped out of the rank and said:
“You don’t know me, Mr. Twichell; but I know your daughter, and that
gives me the privilege of shaking hands with you.”
Then she put out her hand to me, and said:
“And I wish to shake hands with you too, Mr. Clemens. You don’t remember
me, but you were introduced to me in the arcade in Milan two years and a
half ago by Lieutenant H.”
What had put that story into my head after all that stretch of time? Was
it just the proximity of that young girl, or was it merely an odd
accident?
THE INVALID’S STORY
I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and
sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for
you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man
two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete! –yet such is the
simple truth. But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I
lost my health. I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns
on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter’s night. It is the
actual truth, and I will tell you about it.
I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter’s night, two years ago, I
reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first
thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood friend
and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and that his
last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains home to
his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin. I was greatly shocked and
grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must start at
once. I took the card, marked “Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,
Wisconsin,” and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway
station. Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been
described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put
safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room to
provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars. When I returned,
presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young
fellow examining around it, with a card in his hands, and some tacks and
a hammer! I was astonished and puzzled. He began to nail on his card,
and I rushed out to the express car, in a good deal of a state of mind,
to ask for an explanation. But no–there was my box, all right, in the
express car; it hadn’t been disturbed. [The fact is that without my
suspecting it a prodigious mistake had been made. I was carrying off a
box of guns which that young fellow had come to the station to ship to a