Many of the reading public will remember the sad accident which occurred in Hartford, Conn., in the year 1853, when by the bursting of a boiler connected with a car factory, several of the workmen were killed. Among the killed were two Irishmen, brothers, each of whom left a widow, with an infant child. These men had been industrious and faithful toward their employers, and kind in their own households, so that when they were taken away in such a sudden and shocking manner, their sorrowing widows felt a double stroke, in the loss of affectionate hearts, and in the deprivation of many of the comforts which the hand of affection had hitherto supplied. Their little ones, too, required much of their attention, and often seriously interfered with their efforts to provide for the daily wants of their desolate households. About six months after the accident, the Hartford post master received from the Department at Washington a "dead letter," which had been written by these brothers to a female relative in Ireland, enclosing a draft for ten pounds sterling, to defray the expenses of her passage to America. This anxiety on the part of these children of Erin who had come to this land of promise, to furnish their relatives and friends whom they had left behind, with the means of following them, is a striking manifestation of that ardent attachment to home and its circle of loved ones, which leads them to undergo every sacrifice in order to effect a reunion with those for whose presence they long with irrepressible desires, as they go about, "strangers in a strange land." They have often been known to submit to the severest privations for the sake of bringing over a sister, a brother, or some other relative, without whom the family circle would be incomplete. All this is but one aspect of the "Irish heart," whose warmth of affection and generous impulses should put to shame many, who without their ardent unselfishness, coolly laugh at the blunders and _mal apropos_ speeches of its possessors, and attribute that to shallowness, which is in truth but a sudden and sometimes conflicting flow of ideas. As the mad poet McDonald Clark once wrote in an epigram on an editor who had accused him of possessing "zigzag brains," "I can tell Johnny Lang, by way of a laugh, Since he's dragged in my name to his pen-and-ink brawl, That some people think it is better by half To have brains that are 'zigzag,' than no brains at all!" "By their works ye shall know them." It is comparatively easy to utter the language of affection, and to express a vast deal of fine sentiment; and much of this spurious coin is current in the world. But when one is seen denying himself almost the necessaries of life, in order to accumulate a little fund for the benefit of some one near to his heart, though far away, we feel that there can be no deception here. Like the widow's mite, it has the ring of pure gold.