Mrs. Leary took the accidents of "Andy" lightly. If he should happen to be killed some day her heart would not be broken. She spoke of the death of her baby three months before without feeling, mentioning the doctor's bills. But when I asked her to tell me about her oldest boy who died two years ago of diphtheria, I could see at once that I was on different ground. Her eyes filled with tears, and there was grief and longing in her voice as she talked about him. You see he was only five, but they understood each other. When she was unhappy he knew it. He would climb up in her lap, she said, and put his arms around her neck and say, "Don't cry, Mommy; I love you."
Mrs. Burns, a pretty Irish widow, whose husband was crushed while coupling cars, is obviously well satisfied with the $4,000 insurance he left. She takes boarders and is carefully saving the insurance money for her little girl's education. Her affections are set on this child. She has a tender memory of her Tom as he started off to work whistling that last morning, but she makes no pretence to mourn for him. She frankly admits that her marriage was not successful enough to make her risk it again.
Thus it is with Mrs. Andrews, a woman whose husband was killed in the mill. I found her smiling and contented a year later. Her man had been good and faithful while he lived, but after he died, her brother came to live with her and help her raise her two boys. He earned just as much, and she was perfectly satisfied with the situation.
On the other hand, I knew of a six months' bride who shot herself three weeks after her husband was killed. And a young German woman, whose father had been run over by a dinky engine in the mill, said to me in a choking voice, "Oh, when it comes to tellin' how he died, it breaks my heart." I have seen mothers and fathers in middle life who had become broken and old in a year after the death of a son, and a few women whom I visited eighteen months after such a tragedy, were literally unable to speak of it.
There was one wild-eyed little Scotch woman, Mrs. MacGregor, who refused to talk with me at all. I learned from a neighbor that she had twice been insane. Some years ago, when they had lived near the railroad, a little three-year-old girl of hers, who was playing before the house, ran in front of a train. The mother reached the child just in time to touch her dress as the engine tore her away. The mother lost her reason and was sent to an asylum. After six or eight months she recovered and came home. Then, one morning two years later, she got word to come at once to the hospital, that her son was dying. He was a lineman at Edgar Thompson, and had left home to go to work as usual two hours before. In some way,--no one ever knew how,--he had fallen from a ladder and broken his skull. After this second blow the mother was again insane.