Martinsburg Independent

A Wonderful Romance.
[Cincinnati Star.]
Thirty years ago John Seitz, a German clerk in a New York store, was engaged to a young girl named Katherine Rief. The California gold fever broke out, and he joined a party of adventurers. The first letter he received from home bore the tidings that his sweetheart was soon to become the mother of his child. He pledged himself to return as soon as possible and marry her. She went to Honesdale to live with her brother, and to wait for her lover's return. Two or three letters came, and then there was silence for years. A young blacksmith named Wendt professed great love for her, and after putting him off for four or five years, she accepted him, fully convinced that her gold hunter was dead. She took her child to New York and lived with her husband. He was a brute. He abused her, neglected her and threw her into consumption. In the meantime Seitz, instead of writing letters or dying, had made an enormous fortune and returned to Honesdale after his wife and child. The news of her marriage stunned him. He went to New York and found her dying in a tenement, no one near her but her baby—his child. He buried her in Greenwood, and a week afterward Wendt, overcome with remorse, shot himself over her grave.
The child was left in Honesdale with her brother's family, and his father returned to San Francisco, where he married, built a fine house with an elegant apartment known as "Johnny's room," and provided liberally for the boy in his will. "Johnny" was a frail lad, with his mother's consumptive tendencies. He never occupied that palatial room; he died a week ago Tuesday, as rich as a prince. But he did not know of his good fortune, for the father died in San Francisco barely an hour before the son's death. The boy's inheritance goes to his aunt.