At the Bottom of a Mine.—Years ago some Welsh miners, in exploring an old pit that had been long closed, found the body of a young man dressed in a fashion long out of date. The peculiar action of the air of the mine had been such as to preserve the body so perfectly that it appeared asleep rather than dead. The miners were puzzled at the circumstance; no one in the district had been missed within their remembrance; and at last it was resolved to bring the oldest inhabitant—an old lady, long past her eightieth year, who had lived single in the village the whole of her life. On being brought into the presence of the body, a strange scene occurred: the old lady fell on the corpse, kissed and addressed it by every term of loving endearment, couched in the quaint language of a by-gone generation. "He was her only love; she had waited for him during her long life; she knew that he had not forsaken her."
The old woman and the young man had been betrothed sixty years before. The lover had disappeared mysteriously, and she had kept faithful during that long interval. Time had stood still with the dead man, but had left its mark on the living woman. The miners who were present were a rough set, but very gently, and with tearful eyes, they removed the old lady to her house, and the same night her faithful spirit rejoined that of her long-lost lover.
THAT EARTHQUAKE!
Did you ever play in a cellar? I don't mean a cellar with a smooth floor, and coal-bins, and a big furnace, and shelves with jars of nice jam on them and glasses of jelly; I've been in that kind of a cellar too—I like quince jelly the best; it's first rate spread on bread and butter—but I'm talking of another kind of a cellar, one with the house all taken away, and only a big brick chimney left in the centre, with the top knocked off of that, and bricks and pieces of stone and chunks of mortar scattered all round; with berry bushes growing in one corner, and wild vines growing all around the edges.
There was just such a cellar as this where I used to live, and Kate and Teddy Ames, who lived in the next house, used to come over and play in the cellar with Billy and me.
Billy was my brother, eight years old, and the best fellow to play with you ever saw, because he was always "sperimentin"—that's what mother called it, and it meant trying to do things.
Billy knew a great deal more than all the rest of the boys in our school, and he was very fond of reading, but it didn't make him stupid a bit, for whatever he read about he always wanted to go right off and see if he could do it too. This made great fun for us, and got Billy into lots of scrapes.
When he tried to do anything like what he had read about, he never would be satisfied until he could do it all exactly as the reading said it was. So when we had read Robinson Crusoe together—I think Billy knew it all by heart as well as he knew the table of sevens in the multiplication table—he said, "Now let's play Robinson Crusoe." First he called the old open cellar Crusoe's cave, and scooped out a place between some stones and made it clean, and I braided a little mat and a curtain out of some long grass for it, and there he put his old copy of Robinson Crusoe, and for days and days, after school was out, and in vacation, we played Robinson Crusoe together.
Kate was a parrot, and wanted a great deal of cracker, Teddy was a goat, and I was the dog and "man Friday" by turns. We walked about in the cellar pretending to look for the print of naked feet, Billy going in front carrying a rusty old broken musket we had found in the garret, and a piece of rubber hose (Billy always could find or make anything we wanted) for a telescope, which he used to look through to see if there were any savages in sight when he climbed up to the edge of the cellar.