The Lafayette gazette. [volume] (Lafayette, La.) 1893-1921, 1896-01-25
\ WEDDING TOMBSTONE.
M cLAn1cE l. -xtNoHAN.

A WEDDING TOMBSTONE.
BIZ CLARlCE I. .LIN0HAN.
no. tell of Melint,y Har-
bour's W d Il n ,
tombstone?" said
IAN N grandma, in a tone
III N of surprise. "For
II the lnntl's sake, I
thought every body
knew about that"
confessed the
most abject ignorance and inlmedia tely
drew up to the fire. This was partly to
pain Information and partly because.
although the fireplace was wide and
deep-throated and big logs were blazing
in it, there were biting dr~ughts of
singing air coming in ut the loosel y-fit-
ting door. For grandmother would not
he persuaded to leave the home that had
showed some signs of decay. She sat
knitting vigorously by the freight,
for. although she had all the modern
ronveniences of heating and lighting,
her big fireplace cast it's ruddy glow
out into the room through all the long
winter evenings. I was an angular
schoolgirl of Is then, with n great love
CT the romantic, and was on four
weeks visit at the old homestead. 1t
seemed never to occur to grandma that,
having becn-raised in n different pnrt of
the country, the happenings at Ragged
Corner (vhere she lived) would nat
urally be unknown to me. She always
expressed fresh surprise at my ig-
norance on these subjects. After knit
ting a few minutes in silence, she be-
gan:
you've seen the old stone house down
on the bank of the river, all shut in with
pines and cvesgreens? It's nigh hun
dred years old. When was born it had
been built ten years. When I was a
young married woman the Barbours
came to live there, ind they were proud,
high-fecln' people that nobody could
get acquainted with. That's what made
I'm take it so tretful hard when-but
here 1 am. way head of my story. You
zee. Mr.. Barbour -'bezzled or did some
thing of that XIII -, and went to prison.
"rhen his wife and little boy shut
themselves up in the stone house and
never went outside the gate hardly.
She's had good deal of schoolin', his
mot her had, and she taught him her
self rs long as she could, and then he
bought books and studied by himself.
He tried going to school when he was a
small boy, but one of the scholars
threw 1T Mt him ABOUT ms 1ather, ana
Mortimer nearly killed him, and after
that his mother KEEP him home. And she
was such 81 proud woman, was Mis- Bar
bo,Ir, and lofty and severe in her ways.
She wouldn't let nobody sympathize
with her. which everybody wanted to,
as there's so little going on in n place
like Ragged Corner. Mis- Barbour was
real selfish with her grief, SO she got her.
self disliked, besides folks bein' sus-
picious after the way her husband
turned out. What did they live on?
Oh, the boy farned it, and later they do
say he wrote books on what they called
natural history. though to my mind it
was the most unnatural stuff 1 ever
heard tell of-all about beetles and bugs
with 300 muscles in their Leads, and as
could carry 1 200 times their own weight
on their own backs, which everybody
knows he must have got up as he went
along. They were dretfully taken up
with each other, he and his mother,
and she believed everything he said was
so, even about the bugs and beetles.
But she was his own born mother, and
that explains it.
"Nhen she died, Mortimer liked to
went crazy. He planted her grave with
vi'lets and pansies, and at the head was
n white marble monument he had gone
to the city for-nothing nearer would
suit him. But he didn't display no taste.
Nothing on it. my dear, but the old
ladv's name and the date she died-not