Death's clammy hand brushed a golden-haired moppet Tuesday afternoon.
Gentlewomen swooned in the crowd that quickly gathered at the corner of South Main and Elm Streets, so near had tragedy come to that little girl, Irma Littlefield, aged four, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Adoniram Littlefield of 324 Elm Street, that afternoon. Men wept unashamedly when little Irma, lying crumpled in the dust, stirred her tiny limbs and opened eyes of deepest blue, even as her shrieking mother flew to the side of her baby.
Death had passed by Irma, yes. Yet the uncaring runaway freight wagon that had so nearly snuffed out her brief existence had dealt the child a blow even as cruel, more savage; perhaps as grievous a hurt as would have been the sweet baby's death to her stricken parent, sobbing now with the child's golden head in her lap.
For from Irma's ashen lips, cold still with the awful nearness of the Grim Reaper, the first faltering words were,
"Where's Tinkle, my little doggie?"
Tinkle, a curly-haired mongrel to the unseeing world, nothing to the insensible, crushing wheels of the now-distant freight wagon. Tinkle, more than a dog, more than a pet, more than it is given us in our wisdom to know, to that little child. A friend, confidante, companion in all her infant games and journey of the imagination.
"Where's Tinkle?" Alas, Irma....
"That's plenty of that," I told Sara. "Is that what you mean by Heart? Is that what you mean by 'news'?
"It wouldn't even rate two lines in your own Argus today.
"But don't try to tell me that the major newspapers changed from that mawkish, overblown sentimentality about unimportant or nonexistent things. They just printed the same sort of drivel using governments and countries instead of people. They cluttered themselves up with portentous speculation and conflicting interpretation until the actual relation of real events was crowded off the page—because plain facts weren't exciting enough to sell newspapers!