Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/60

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
34
HENRY VILLARD
[1855

take the midnight train to St. Louis, and was found murdered on the street the next morning. No clue was ever obtained to the motive or the perpetrator of the deed, though every effort was made and the State offered a reward of ten thousand dollars. Mrs. Tyndale's three sisters, Rosa, Clara, and Theresa, presented the remarkable case of having married three brothers Tittmann, who, belonging to a distinguished family in Saxony settled in Dresden and Leipzig, went to America from political choice and necessity. Clara, the younger of the two, was a woman of unusual parts, which had, moreover, been carefully developed, and from an early age she was tireless in her endeavor to store her mind with miscellaneous knowledge. Her tastes were strongly linguistic and literary. She was constituted very differently from her sister Rosa, who was quite as intellectual and, at the same time, a picture of sweet womanhood. She must have been beautiful as a young girl.

Besides my relatives, there were a great many nice people living in Belleville and its immediate vicinity. The town had but six or seven thousand inhabitants, and had no special external attractions except that it contained an almost purely German community. I was told that the population included only a few hundred native Americans. We hardly ever heard any English spoken. The business signs were almost exclusively in German. But this very German character of the place and the adjacent settlements made Belleville peculiarly attractive to people of that nationality, of high as well as of low degree. There was a curious representation of the former living in and about the place — quite a sprinkling of noblemen and jurists, doctors, academic teachers, and other professional men, together with merchants of the best type. Most of them had come to America either as political refugees or as victims of the fickleness of fortune; but not a few had, like my uncles, emigrated from choice. All sorts of callings were followed by them in town, and quite a number tried to earn their living as farmers. The latter were known among their own