How I Won My Wife

by L.B. Angell

“Did I ever tell you how I won my wife?” inquired Paul R---, the famous detective, as we were taking a quiet stroll in the park.

“No,” I said eagerly, “let’s hear it, please.”

“Well, you must know that my business as a detective brings me in daily contact with all kinds of people, and I learn their inmost family details and troubles. So much by the way of explanation, now to my story. Just two years ago this month, an old gentleman from Chichester, came to the department in great distress. He wanted the services of the best detective to be had, and as I bear that destinction, he sent me. Just here let me mention that the whole force, myself excepted, were trying to catch a notorious house-breaker and thief called ‘Dandy Jim,’ but without success so far; the fellow was as keen as a weasel to scent danger, and he possessed a wonderful faculty of slipping through the police. You may wonder what he has to do with my story. Just wait and see.

As soon as the old gentleman, Pierce was his name, was closeted with me, he told me his trouble. He had come to the city to try and find his only child, who had eloped with a stranger. The facts of the case were briefly stated as follows:

Dellie, his daughter, was, by the will of her mother’s only brother, left the sole heiress of sixty thousand dollars, and at the age of eighteen, she was to come into full possession of the property. In just one week she would be eighteen, but in the meantime she had become acquainted with a young fellow from the City, and fallen in love with him or thought she had, which is just the same with a young girl, and when her father who did not fancy him, ordered him to keep away from his house, the fellow persuaded her to elope to New York with him. Dellie had left a note for her parents, telling them where she had gone, and that she should not return until she was Mrs.… Read More