“What did you say his last words were?”

“Why, just before his soul took its eternal flight he whispered something in my ear.  Then I made a sudden dash and escaped from the savages, to bring his message back to you.  That message was:  ’Break the news gently to Maria.’  That’s what the major said with his dying lips.”

“Well, then, why don’t you break the news to Maria?”

“Madam, such levity is untimely.  I have broken it—­broken it gently.  You have heard it all.”

“Do you suppose I am Major Bing’s wife?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, she moved around into Market street last December.  Maybe you’d better hunt her up.”

The general looked at Mrs. Wood solemnly for a minute, and then he said he would.  Then he bade Mrs. Wood good-morning, bowed himself out and walked around to look for the widow.  When the real widow heard the news, she was deeply affected, and she sobbed in a most distressing manner.  Subsequently she went into mourning.  The life insurance company paid her the money due upon the major’s policy.  The major’s lodge passed resolutions of regret, his family divided up his property, and the community settled down comfortably in the conviction that the major was finally and hopelessly dead.

About a year afterward, however, Major Bing suddenly arrived in town without announcing his coming.  He had been held as a prisoner by the Indians, and had escaped.  As he stepped from the cars a policeman looked at him a minute, then seized him by the collar and hurried him around to the coroner’s office.  Before he could recover from his amazement the coroner empaneled a jury, put the action of the insurance company in evidence and promptly got from the jury a verdict that “the said Bing came to his death at the hands of the Indians.”

Then the major went to his house and found his widow sitting on the front porch talking to Myers, the man to whom she was engaged to be married.  As he entered the gate his widow gave one little start of surprise, and then, regaining her composure, she said to Myers,

“Isn’t this a new kind of an idea—­dead people coming around when common decency requires them to keep quiet?”

“It’s altogether wrong,” said Myers.  “If I was dead, I’d lie still and quit wandering about over the face of the earth.”

“Maria, don’t you know me?” asked the major, indignantly.

“I used to know you when you were alive; but now that you’re gone, I don’t expect to recognize you until we meet in a better world.”

“But, Maria, I am not dead.  You certainly see that I am alive.”

“Not dead!  Didn’t you send word to me that you were?  Am I to refuse to believe my own husband?  The life insurance company says you are deceased; the lodge says so; the coroner officially asserts the fact.  What am I to do?  The evidence is all one way.”

“But you shall accept me as alive!” shouted the major, in a rage.