Butler citizen. [volume] (Butler, Pa.) 1877-1922, 1881-03-23

just as the benediction was pronounced
/ he seemed to be on the point of succeed
ing.
| 1t was very rarely, however, that
John could get away from his engine
to go to church, but on Sundays he
would shave and brush and wash and
dress with special reference to not soil
ing her Sabbath calico when Matilda
should sit in his lap and tell him, in her
piping eagerness, of everything she
could think of. People accepted the
malaria which broodcd over the part of
the town in which they lived as they
did the river which dragged its slow
current so near them, but the engineer
had no touch of the chills and fever
which, as she grew up, so seized upon
and shook the girl 1t was matter of
course that Matilda should become
| thinner as she became taller, that her
face should waste in consequence of the
ague which alternately fevered it to
scarlet or chilled it to ashes. As long,
however, as propriety permitted, she
continued to perch herself in the lap of
her one chief friend, and afterward to
sit as near John as possible while she
talked, talked, talked to him.
For while the sober, stolid. monoto-
nously motioned man had nothing
whatever to say, she bad very much to
chatter about. The truth is, the home
ly girl developed from her earliest days
and amazing love for books and for mu-
sic. Finding her way almost from in
fancy to the school-house, she skipped
everything like hard study to read in
stead any and every story-book or vel
ume of poems she could lay her hands
upon. So of music, it was useless to
try to confne Matilda to the severe
study and practice thereof, even when
her friend, to the astonishment of those
who knew his parsimony, hired a piano
for her When she was not reading
novels or poetry, she was thrumming
out chance tunes, playing only By ear.
A good-hcarted, shallow-brained, feeble
bodied, sentimental girl she set her
heart in the end upon going off to fe-
male institute In another State. Her
surly father had put into strong and Of
ten repeated adjectives his ideas con-
cerning his daughter; but the engineer
had one day private conversation with
Peter johnson, as the result of which
Matilda departed according to her wish
and was gone for two Years. To do
her justice, she loved the grimy macbin-
ist with all her feeble nature and wrote
him many long letter John cherish
ed the epistles as they came with all re-
spect but to do him also stern justice
he rarely read and never answered
them The frequent letters looked so
clean, the writing upon them was of so
spiderv character that he was en-
barrassed. His fingers were too oily
just then; something had broken about
the machinery, and it must be meuded
right away; when be came for his meals
he was so hungry; at night he was so
dead tired Besides, the poor girl had
fallen unresisting into the mysterious
popularity of her sex, and under the
working of its gloomy law she could
not write except with needle-pointed
pen, in the palest of ink, the longest of
letters, and with every page crossed
aud recrossed at that. Moreover, when
John did open letter under pressure
of conscience, there was no particular
date thereto, nor was it possible for
him to tell upon which page the docu-
ment began, any more than where it
ended
But, all along, tie girl was, l am
sure, as nothing to the engineer in COM
parison to the longod-for improvement
in his engine. She was little more to
him at last than blue.jay would have
been had it perched of summers day,
chirping and preening its feathers, upon
the rafter over the boiler. John would
not have scolded the bird, nor driven it
away by jet of steam, but he would
not have cared had it been killed there
without his knowing it. So of his
schoolgirl friend. He had never per-
mitted her to show her sallow face at
the door, even, of his Power House.
If she had come into it, and been struck
and slain by the great wheel, he would
have grieved over it; but the wheel
would have been in the right of it, and
he would have said so. What show Of
force was there in the puny damsel to
allow him to care for her as he did for
his enginel
Even before the return of Matilda
from her institute it had become clear
to her househould, as it had to John
Detmold, that there was nothing for
him to dc, having done everything
else for the girl so far, but to marry her.
In his mattcr-of-course way he in due
time did that duty also, at the same So
Der gait with which he did every thing
and they went to housekeeping in
modest house upon the bank of the
river, and not so far from the Power
House but that the husband could
hear above the tongue of his wife every
puff of the escaping and scoifing steam.
Marriage made merely this difference.
that Matilda had more perfect possession
of the engineer for purposes peculiar to
her from infancy. If John had not
read her letters, none the less had she
written them, and that had developed
fearfully what had always been within
her lurking disease. If her intellect
was narrow and not too vigorous, at
least she had not burdened it with
learning too heavy. A frail spark at
best, she had so heaped upon it the
chaff of the Iightest of literature, there
had been so very much ofsuch fuel also,
that the flame, if she was not to sutfo-
cate, must find outlet. Not only must
she sign, must she talk, it was essential
to her that she should write also
write prose and verse in all their, in
her hands, innumerable varieties. Nor
had she sufficiently expressed herself
until she had read to John what she
had written He was n muscular man