DEVOTION TO THE HELPLESS
In a newspaper account of a shipwreck, a touching incident is thus described by a survivor:
There was one incident which came particularly to my notice—the devotion of a woman to her blind husband. With her arm linked in his, she sought the rail of the Florida to be transferred to the Baltic.
An officer grabbed the man and hurled him to the rear. “Women and children only in these boats,” he yelled, as the man tumbled backward. The wife ran to her husband’s side and, again taking his arm, she appealed to the officer.
“He is blind! Can’t you see he is helpless?” she said. “I have never left him. If he can not go in the boat with me, I will stay here until this ship sinks under me.”
The unwritten law of the sea was waived before this plea, and that lone man, sightless and helpless, was permitted to accompany his wife, who would not leave the Florida until her husband was permitted to go with her.
(762)
Dew, The Existence of the—See [Separation].
DIABOLICAL POSSESSION
An old man, nearly octogenarian, who has been in bed for twenty-seven years, being a harmless monomaniac, having the delusion that his Satanic majesty always stood at his door to prevent him from going out, suddenly one morning, early in June, took it into his head that the devil was gone, whereupon he got out of bed, and, with nothing on but his shirt walked down to the quay (nearly a quarter of a mile) and jumped over. Having been a good swimmer in his early days, he struck out, and altho a boat put off from a vessel, he swam ashore.—Public Opinion.