*****
Some of our first Winter evenings here we spent in playing whist at the Dennison home. They are worth mentioning, for the people who played with us, and the story of some of them. Mr. Dennison had once been manager of the Waltham Watch Works, and it was he who invented watch making by machinery. He is called the “father of American watch making.” He is a tall, fine looking gentleman of seventy, with kind eyes, pleasant speech, modest manners, and universal genius. He seemed to know everything that concerns the working of a machine.
Our best whist-player at the table was Mr. Sadler, a kind old English gentleman who brought Christmas cake to my wife, regularly as the holiday came. He kept the story of his life secret. He was a mystery, and no one dared to pry into his past. We knew him to be rich, though he lived like a poor man in an obscure pension.
One day, just as I was in Liverpool on my way home from New York, he was murdered in a quiet park; no soul suspects by whom. Then we found out that he had been a member of the English Parliament, who for some mysterious misdemeanor, in association with his brother, also in Parliament, had to fly England. He got away by feigning sickness and death, having himself carried out of the hospital in a coffin. His wife, of whom we had never heard before, appeared suddenly at his death, like a specter. She claimed his money, which can not be found, though I personally knew he had thousands, and as suddenly and specter-like departed. It is all mystery, even to-day. His banker, shortly after the murder, received a mysterious and unsigned telegram from New York City, saying: “Give yourself no trouble as to who killed Sadler. He will not be found.” The murderer had not had time to reach New York. Who sent the telegram?
Another of that card quartette was the lovely Miss Dimmick, of Boston, a medical student at the University here. She was the first young lady graduate at Zurich, and she finished with great honors. Then she went home on a visit. On her return, we arranged to meet her in Paris, but one morning came the shocking news that she and five hundred others had drowned at the wreck of the “Schiller.”
Early one morning, in a terrible fog, the steamer Schiller struck a rock off the Scilly isles. Almost everybody was lost. The last seen of Miss Dimmick she was on the deck, kneeling in her night robe, her hands clasped, her face turned to heaven in prayer. When the peasants of the island found her body, there was a beauty and a peace in her countenance that touched them, and moved them to treat her tenderly. They placed her by herself, and when the officers came later to take some of the bodies away, they prayed permission to bear her coffin on their shoulders to the ship.
Boston City Hospital voted some money and named one of the free ward beds in honor of Miss Dimmick.
Now I recall those little card evenings at the Dennison’s with strange feelings.