Jack O’Reilly, barber in West Third Street, Los Angeles, Cal., had the surprise of his life a few days ago. A prosperous-looking man walked into the shop. When the job was done, the patron unlimbered a wad of bills, stripped off a fifty-dollar yellowback, and said: “Things have come my way handsomely. Here’s a bit of a tip.” Leaving O’Reilly stupefied with astonishment, the man walked out. He was a prosperous Los Angeles stock broker, O’Reilly said. Asks $500 for Loss of Faded Army Uniform. On the loss of a faded blue army uniform, a relic of the Civil War, Mrs. Mary Heintzelman, seventy-three years old, of Minneapolis, Minn., bases a claim for five hundred dollars against Hennepin County, which she has already filed. Five years ago Mrs. Heintzelman went to the Hennepin County poor farm. Her only possessions were packed in an old-fashioned trunk. In the top tray lay the old uniform and a packet of soldier’s letters, written on the heavy blue stationery used in war times. They were the only links that bound the old woman’s life to the highest happiness her life had known. The uniform, more than half a century ago, had been worn to the war by George Heintzelman of the Forty-seventh Pennsylvania infantry. They had been betrothed, she and the young soldier, when he marched away to war. The memories of those days when he and she were young have been the only comforts in the old woman’s life. Three years later Heintzelman came back, badly wounded. He recovered, but a bullet through his lung had impaired his health. They were married, and moved West. The husband’s health did not improve. A few years later he died. Mrs. Heintzelman stored the old uniform and the letters in the trunk and set about to make her own way in the world. The years that followed were lonely and full of hard work and trouble. The treasures in the trunk were the only solaces in the woman’s life. Finally, too old to work longer, she went to the home. Every spring, on the anniversary of the day that her lover had marched away, Mrs. Heintzelman would take out the old uniform and hang it on the line to air. Softly she would caress the faded garment and read over the old letters, and her sadness and loneliness would be lost in the flood of pleasant memories that floated back from her youth. A week ago, as the old uniform hung upon the line, a cinder descended from a smokestack. It smoldered for a moment in the garment, flared up, and Mrs. Heintzelman’s last treasure was gone forever. Blasted Romance of Poor Aunt Emily. When board of health inspectors of Indianapolis, Ind., went to the home of Emily Smith, a recluse, to remove piles of dust-covered books and papers which literally filled her little house, they uncovered a hidden fortune and unearthed a story of a blasted romance. Fifty years ago the woman was a belle in the English settlement in New York City and was preparing to be married, when the man who had won her was stricken with fever and died.