Tires of Looking at His Own Gravestone.
Francis M. Collins, eighty-eight-year-old war veteran, has grown tired and lonely sitting at the foot of his own grave in Forest Home Cemetery, at Milwaukee, Wis., admiring the flowers and the monument—especially the monument. Collins has decided that man was not meant to be alone, on the earth or under it, and is planning to get married.
For twelve years Collins has been a daily visitor at the grave. For a long time it was a source of pride for him to look at his name and war record carved in a solitary magnificence on the handsome tombstone. He prepared for his burial by a budget filed with a certificate for five hundred dollars with a local bank.[Pg 60]
The solitary name on one side of the stone began to look forlorn and lonely. The veteran got the habit of romancing on how nice it would be to have another name—her name—on the opposite side. There was no particular woman then. But there is now. Her name is Orrie Viola—something—but Collins will not tell the rest of it.
The other day a stone carver came trudging through the cemetery with his tools. He hunted around in the vicinity of the chapel until he found a plot that looked like a little garden, and beside it was an old man with a patriarchal beard. When the stone carver left, the name “Orrie Viola Collins” smiled back at the afternoon sun, and Collins was smiling up at the newly carved name.