Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/201

 THE INVALID S STORY

1SEEM 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 &quot;Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem, Wisconsin,&quot; 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

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