The Evening Tribune

CAT AS GO BETWEEN.
Stewarts Haven't Exchanged a Word In Eighteen Years.
The Wife Is a Devout Methodist While the Husband Is an Atheist.
THEY HAVE NEVER QUARRELLED.
Couple Have Been Married Thirty-Six Years and For Nearly Two Score Years Have Maintained an Unbroken Silence.
There was a rumor around Matawan, N. J., recently that old John Stewart and his wife had broken a silence of 18 years between them and were once more speaking one to the other.
Mrs. Stewart has borne a very heavy cross for many years, and no one has ever heard her complain. She is a devout Methodist. Her husband, to whom she has been married 36 years, is an atheist. For love of this man, whose views are so radically different from her own, she has continued to live and work that he might have a home, but for 18 years they have not exchanged a word.
All this time the two have lived in a tiny house where they were constantly thrown together, and yet each has carried on a separate existence.
The Stewarts live about three miles west of Matawan, on the road leading to Oldbridge. They have a farm of 12 acres, and this they have cultivated so carefully that, with the observance of much frugality, they have saved some money.
The wife is little, old, yellow and shriveled. She was reared in the Methodist church, and when at 31 years of age she was married to John Stewart, he, too, was a God fearing man—a pillar in the Methodist church.
For many years they lived as happily as any man and wife could live, and then the serpent entered their paradise. It came in the form of the doctrines of anarchy, which the husband began to study. He became an enemy of law and order and loved to argue on the points of his new belief. Then he read Voltaire and other writers opposed to the Christian religion, and next he was an atheist.
These departures into so called advanced thought were a great sorrow to his devout helpmeet, and gently did she try to win him back to the belief in which he had been born and bred. The husband resented these pleadings as the interference of the weak with the strong and thoughtful.
At first he would not listen. Then he argued, and finally he became angry. The woman wavered long between love and religious duty. Then she saw that her efforts to reclaim the backslider would be fruitless. He was a hard headed man. No one had ever been able to lead him from an opinion once he made it his own.
The wife feared that her husband would cease to love her if she continued to play the missionary. She was afraid that he might leave her in obedience to one of his creeds.
So she made a compact with him. They were never to speak again. There could then be no quarrels about anything. He agreed, glad, he said, to be exempted from what he called her nagging.
That was more than 18 years ago, and as yet they have not exchanged a word. The story that the embargo had been raised proved not true. Mrs. Stewart told a reporter recently that there was no change in their relations.
It was true, the old woman admitted, that a cat had been their intermediary all the years of silence. Not the same cat all the time, she said, for cats would come and go, but they had always had one cat or another to act as the go between.
If a meal was ready, the wife told the cat. The husband heard the message and sat at the table. If the man wanted anything at the table, he made his wishes known to the cat.
And so it was day in and day out through all the years, no matter what the occasion might be. There has never been a quarrel. The farm belongs to the wife.
"Yes," said she yesterday, "I cook and wash for him. Why should I let him suffer just because he has gone astray! I will always care for him and he will have a home as long as I live. He believes he will die and that will be the end, the same as if he was a beast.
"It is awful to think of, but he will not change. I thank heaven that we have never had any children. I should probably not have been able to guide them aright. Very few children are properly raised."—New York World.