THE INVALID'S STORY

I seem sixty and married, but these effects are due to my condition and
sufferings, for I am a bachelor, and only forty-one. It will be hard for
you to believe that I, who am now but a shadow, was a hale, hearty man
two short years ago, a man of iron, a very athlete!--yet such is the
simple truth. But stranger still than this fact is the way in which I
lost my health. I lost it through helping to take care of a box of guns
on a two-hundred-mile railway journey one winter's night. It is the
actual truth, and I will tell you about it.

I belong in Cleveland, Ohio. One winter's night, two years ago, I
reached home just after dark, in a driving snow-storm, and the first
thing I heard when I entered the house was that my dearest boyhood friend
and schoolmate, John B. Hackett, had died the day before, and that his
last utterance had been a desire that I would take his remains home to
his poor old father and mother in Wisconsin. I was greatly shocked and
grieved, but there was no time to waste in emotions; I must start at
once. I took the card, marked "Deacon Levi Hackett, Bethlehem,
Wisconsin," and hurried off through the whistling storm to the railway
station. Arrived there I found the long white-pine box which had been
described to me; I fastened the card to it with some tacks, saw it put
safely aboard the express car, and then ran into the eating-room to
provide myself with a sandwich and some cigars. When I returned,
presently, there was my coffin-box back again, apparently, and a young