ingly of middle age, with a very handsome and friendly face. His eyes were dark grey, and there was a very tender light in them as he turned to his fair fellow-traveler. " Our honeymoon has begun, Elda," he said. " Tell me again that you are not sorry to have left home, friends, country, all for me." " I do," she said, softly. "Oh Leopold, had Itodo it all again, it would not cause me a single pang of regret. lam with you and I am content." " And so am I," he said. " I would be a churl, indeed, if I were not, after such assurance." " How happy.we will be, Leo," she murmured, after an interval of blissful silence, during which her eyes lingered lovingly on his face. " How happy, indeed " he began. But a prolonged, wailing shriek from the whistle—a shrill, agonized, half-human cry, it seemed—drowned his words. And ere the echoes had died away in the clear, cold night, they heard the noise of grinding brakes, the sibilant hiss of escaping steam, mingled with cries of distress—a frightful babel of horrible sounds. Then, while Elda clung to her husband in a paroxysm of fear, there came a sudden forward lurch of the car, a swift plunge downward into abysmal darkness, a terrible crash and then oblivion, deep and lasting as death itself. An hour later, while the work of rescue progressed, a man, wild and disheveled, ran frantically up and down the banks of the narrow, rapid stream, calling in a voice which sounded loud above the rush of the waters and the crying of the wounded, " Eldal Flda I come back to me!" But no answering voice was heard. For even at that moment, far down the little stream, washed ashore on a sandy bar, the body of his newly-wedded wife lay, pale and still, looking ghostly and ghastly in the light of the waning moon. It was a bitterly cold night, even for St. Petersburg. Keen winds, driving through rapidly falling snow, hurled the sharp par ticles with stinging force into the faces of the passers-by. Down near the wharves, where the damp fog hung like a pall, they shrieked through the rigging of the achored vessels with a voice like the wailing of lost souls. To an imaginative mind, it was The Free Lance [ PEBRUARY,
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers