knows it fully, and he will judge righteously.  There was trouble, rage, and tears, passionate partings and penitent reunions—­the old story of love dying a lingering yet violent death.  On the fatal morning I met him on Washington street.  I noticed his manner was hurried and his look peculiar, as I gave him the usual salutation and a hearty grasp of the hand.  As be moved away, I looked after him with mingled admiration and pity, until his faultless figure turned the corner and disappeared.

Ten minutes afterward he lay on the floor of his room dead, with a bullet through his brain, his hair dabbled in blood.  At the funeral-service, in the little church on Pine street, strong men bowed their heads and sobbed.  His wife sat on a front seat, pale as marble and as motionless, her lips compressed as with inward pain; but I saw no tears on the beautiful face.  At the grave the body had been lowered to its resting-place, and all being ready, the attendants standing with uncovered heads, I was just about to begin the reading of the solemn words of the burial service, when a tall, blue-eyed man with gray side-whiskers pushed his way to the head of the grave, and in a voice choked with passion, exclaimed: 

“There lies as noble a gentleman as ever breathed, and he owes his death to that fiend!” pointing his finger at the wife, who stood pale and silent looking down into the grave.

She gave him a look that I shall never forget, and the large steely-blue eyes flashed fire, but she spoke no word.  I spoke: 

“Whatever maybe your feelings, or whatever the occasion for them, you degrade yourself by such an exhibition of them here.”

“That is so, sir; excuse me, my feelings overcame me,” he said, and retiring a few steps, he leaned upon a branch of a scrub-oak and sobbed like a child.

The farce and the tragedy of real life were here exhibited on another occasion.  Among my acquaintances in the city were a man and his wife who were singularly mismatched.  He was a plain, unlettered, devout man, who in a prayer-meeting or class-meeting talked with a simple-hearted earnestness that always produced a happy effect.

She was a cultured woman, ambitious and worldly, and so fine-looking that in her youth she must have been a beauty and a belle.  They lived in different worlds, and grew wider apart as time passed by—­he giving himself to religion, she giving herself to the world.  In the gay city circles in which she moved she was a little ashamed of the quiet, humble old man, and he did not feel at home among them.  There was no formal separation, but it was known to the friends of the family that for months at a time they never lived together.  The fashionable daughters went with their mother.  The good old man, after a short sickness, died in great peace.  I was sent for to officiate at the funeral-service.  There was a large gathering of people, and a brave parade of all the externals of grief, but it was mostly dry-eyed grief, so far as I could see.  At the grave, just as the sun that was sinking in the ocean threw his last rays upon the spot, and the first shovelful of earth fell upon the coffin that had been gently lowered to its resting-place, there was a piercing shriek from one of the carriages, followed by the exclamation: