So it was that the children were the first to discover yesterday that the little store was not open for business when they passed it on their way to their first day at school, and “Auntie” Schwartz lost many pennies which her small customers had intended to expend for lead pencils and erasers. “Auntie” Schwartz had called them all in on Sunday evening and had distributed among them all her small stock of candy, telling them that she would have a full new stock for the beginning of school.
Meantime, Mrs. Kate Weck and Mrs. Rose Black, who live above the store, were puzzled by the odor of gas which permeated their apartments. At last the women traced it to the store, which they found closed and locked. The gas came from the two living rooms which the Schwartzes occupied behind their store, and Mrs. Weck and Mrs. Black finally got Policeman McCaffrey of the Hamburg Avenue Station to smash down the door.
The policeman and the women found the old man seated in a chair in the kitchen, a gas tube clutched between his teeth, the other end of which was made fast to a gas jet. He was dead. In the little bedroom they found also the body of Mrs. Schwartz dead like her husband from the gas which she had inhaled. Like him, too, she had tied the tube around her head, so that it should not slip from her mouth.
A search of the rooms showed that the old couple had been in the most abject poverty. Only 67 cents was found in the flat.
CHICAGO, Ill., March 3.--Emma Johnson died on Monday. She was the grave faced little seamstress from La Crosse, Wis., who used to sit every day near a dingy window at 42 Wilson avenue, plying her needle in silence, wearing an expression like that of a nun. And every one said she “looked so peaceful.”
But the coroner’s jury found that the little woman, in whom no one would have suspected deep emotion, had been tempestuously in love, that she had not been able to win the man she wanted, and that she had sat there at her seams, “praying for strength to wait for a natural death.” She did not want to kill herself. But she did.
She went to the home of Mrs. Jennie Nelson, 4212 North avenue. Mrs. Nelson’s brother, William Larson, is the man she wanted to marry. He “was fond of her, too,” as Mrs. Nelson said, “but his health was poor and he did not want to marry for the present.”
