Public Ledger

TOM MARSHALL.
Reminiscences of His Courtships and Marriage.
Mr. Dan M. Bowmar, of Versailles, has been lecturing upon Thomas F. Marshall. He has this interesting account of Mr. Marshall's marriage:

'At the age of fifty Captain Marshall was married to Miss Bettie Yost, which event was the climax of a very romantic episode in his life. In his young manhood he had courted one of his cousins, a lady of wealth, refinement and high social standing, but was discarded. He met the same fate at the hands of one of Louisville's belles. I imagine the cause of defeat in both cases was not so much his eccentric habits or poverty as an utter want of mental congeniality between himself and the ladies he addressed. Small talk and flattery were as impossible to him as 'pigeon' English, and it is no wonder that when he would launch into serious discussions of the mighty problems which crowded his restless brain that the ladies yawned behind their fans, and finally concluded that a lifetime spent in that sort of conversation would be rather monotonous.

Charles Lamb divided the world into two great classes, borrowers and lenders; but one of our Kentucky wits said that a better classification would be talkers and listeners. Marshall was a great talker and was especially fond of a good, appreciative listener. Ladies' society possessed no attraction for him unless the ladies were willing to converse upon subjects congenial to him. He therefore very early became disgusted with 'society people' so-called, and was never what he termed derisively a 'parlor man.'

Among the best, although humblest, people of the little village of Versailles, was the family of Mrs. Yost, and at their home, at the age of thirty or thereabouts, Marshall was a frequent visitor. Bettie, who subsequently became his wife, was then a child of five or six, of some precocity, and remarkable childish beauty. As she grew up, she was known as Marshall's pet and protege, and never wearied of his longest conversations, nor failed to offer him the homage which from the young and beautiful is so grateful to noble minds.

So it came about that she loved him, and would marry no one else, and that the disappointed man, who might at one time have married wealth and fashion, led to the altar the humble girl whose life was bound up in his own. He was most faithful and devoted to her, exhibiting at all times the utmost tenderness of affection, and, although they were sometimes separated by the exigencies of their lot, he never failed to come back, nor to care for her when absent, and died in her arms at last, happy that heaven had spared to him in that hour one constant and unselfish friend.'