The Scranton tribune. [volume] (Scranton, Pa.) 1891-1910, 1897-01-25

fodder and his cattle sold for a song.
Finally his health gave way, and Chris
tel sickened and died. He buried her
on the ninth of November, seventeen
months gone. She had dropped from
the time he began building, she took it
so to heart. That is what the new house
cost him.
There it stood empty and useless. No
one would buy it. He hated it. The
cottage of his fathers, where he and
Chrstel had lived half century in
good and evil days, and where their
children We're born, he was obliged to
sell. The newcomers left him his old
sleeping-room, which he occupied A
lonely old man, he came and went 81
lently, troubling nobody. The new
faces and voices fretted him sorely.
Day and night he missed his Chrstel
and brooded over his misfortune.
The new house was his curse. Had he
not built it, he would not have lost his
health, his money, his home, his farm,
his peace of mind and his good old wife,
over the very thought of ii they two
| fell out for the first time in their lives.
| She kept her word; never looked at 1t
building; never saw it done; it was
, hardly finished when she died. Had he
| listened to her.. all would still be well
| Thus he brooded continually, and a
| dull, impotent rage possessed him more
| and more, a sense of personal enmity
| toward the house which neither he nor
| anybody else wanted, and which had
| robbed him of his Christel, the blessing
| of all his days.
One evening, the previous November,
| he was returning from u neighboring
market town with some Of the villagers.
He had done little enough business,
merely few small matters which he
| had undertaken for the young couple in
| his cottage, and once he was one of the
most important and respected men on
| the market. Such reflections CALLED
| him. 1t was hard, in ones old age, to
lose the fruits of all the patient labor
of ones life, as we'll as the conscious
ness that one is of weight in the com
| munity.
| So he was taciturn, and came along
| with the others. mostly young men
merely from habit, and because they
| were all from Sonnenheim: and sal
| with them in the Drei Mohren and the
| Schwalbe and the Traube, and the 9th
! er inns where they stopped for beel
| or cider or new wine, yet drank moth
ing himself, except one glass of the new
young Thomas Bolz, who was a b
| merry, insisting upon it-and hardly
heard their boasts and laughter, so los,
was he in his own dreariness.
Finally, however, on the road home
ward, their loud wit turned upon him
Rolz, chatting him noisily about wha
people now called "Bleibtreus Folly,
asked him if he was going to hang lac
curtains in the windows and haNt
a doorbell like city folks, perhaps-wh
| knew? a piano, or even a smart youni
wife; such things had happened be
fore now to sly old men; and joked on
not unkindly; but after the 1ovial fash
ion OF young men who have partakel
at brief intervals Of beer, cider and neS
wine Yet as they parted at the stile-
for Bleibtreu's way lay over the fields
the others down the high road to tn
village-young Bolz was not too merr
to notice how weariy the old ma
walked and to turn and accompan
him bit across the fields, holding hi
. am; AMI this was not much after te
O'Clock, as all of them could and di
testify.
Il Toward five o'clock on the followin
morning, B!eibtreu, sleeping soundly
was walked by the young couple, VIII
informed Kim that his new house wa
I burned to the ground. He made n
comment, got up, went over and quietl
surveyed the scene of the confiagratioI
returned and ate a better breakfas
a than usual.
E The authorities, investigating as
$ mere matter of form, examined hiI
4 shade OF suspicion clung to him for
= moment. The building was uninsured
4; What motive, then, could a man hay
to destroy his own property? Beside
. the young men testified, Bolz had IA
5 sisted him some distance on the nigh
{ Of the fire, and II seemed scarcely rea
| sonable to suppose he had retraced HI