Theodore Wennerstroem was married. Nine months after the wedding his
wife presented him with a boy who suffered from rickets--another
thirteen months and Theodore Wennerstroem had breathed his last.

The doctor who filled up the certificate of death, looked at the fine
healthy woman, who stood weeping by the small coffin which contained
the skeleton of her young husband of not much over twenty years.

"The plus was too great, the minus too small," he thought, "and
therefore the plus devoured the minus."

But the father, who received the news of his son's death on a Sunday,
sat down to read a sermon. When he had finished, he fell into a brown
study.

"There must be something very wrong with a world where virtue is
rewarded with death," he thought.

And the virtuous widow, _nee_ Leidschutz, had two more husbands and
eight children, wrote pamphlets on overpopulation and immorality. But
her brother-in-law called her a cursed woman who killed her husbands.

The anything but virtuous lieutenant married and was father of six
children. He got promotion and lived happily to the end of his life.




LOVE AND BREAD