Dr. Johnson's wife was querulous, exacting, old, and the reverse of beautiful, and yet a considerable time after her death he said that ever since the sad event he seemed to himself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction or fixed point of view; a gloomy gazer on the world to which he had little relation. After recording some good resolution in his Journal he was in the habit since her death of writing after it his wife's name--"Tetty." It is only a word; but how eloquent it is! When a certain Mr. Edwards asked him if he had ever known what it was to have a wife, Johnson replied: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it was to _lose a wife_. I had almost broke my heart." Nor did he allow himself to forget this experience. To New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, and his own birthday, which he set apart as sacred days dedicated to solemn thought and high communion with his own soul, he added _the day of his wife's death_. Nor are such separations less felt in humble life. A year or two ago the newspapers in describing a colliery accident related that upon the tin water-bottle of one of the dead men brought out of the Seaham Pit, there was scratched, evidently with a nail, the following letter to his wife: "DEAR MARGARET,--There was forty of us altogether at 7 A.M., some was singing hymns, but my thought was on my little Michael. I thought that him and I would meet in heaven at the same time. Oh, dear wife, God save you and the children, and pray for myself. Dear wife, farewell. My last thoughts are about you and the children. Be sure and learn the children to pray for me. Oh, what a terrible position we are in.--MICHAEL SMITH, 54, Henry Street." The little Michael he refers to was his child whom he had left at home ill. The lad died on the day of the explosion. A writer on _The Orkneys and Shetland_ tells the following. A native of Hoy went one day to his minister and said, "Oh! sir, but the ways of Providence are wonderful! I thought I had met with a sair misfortune when I lost baith my coo and my wife at aince over the cliff, twa months sin; but I gaed over to Graemsay, and I hae gotten a far better coo and a far bonnier wife."