The September 25, 1903 edition of the Mount Union Times contained a rather unusual story.

It was a rather amazing story about an elderly English bachelor who had recently died. Fifty years earlier, when he was a young, energetic, and hopeful man, he met a beautiful girl while he was traveling. He immediately fell in love with her. As soon as he returned to his home, he raced into his study and wrote her a letter.

“In it, he told her that he could not be happy without her and that if she regarded his proposal favorably he would expect a reply by the next mail. To this letter he received no answer and so disappointed was he that from that time until his death, which occurred recently, he shut himself up in his home and lived like a hermit. Most of his time was spent in reading.”

After the gentleman’s death, his heirs–knowing his propensity for reading–decided to search his books in his library, hoping he may have hidden some bank notes in the pages of some old volume.  (His heirs sounds delightful, don’t they?)

“They found none but in a tattered old pamphlet they found another kind a note, the love letter which was written fifty years ago, and which the writer had forgotten to mail.”

I don’t know if this was a true story. It lacks a lot of detail. But it was printed in the news and it does seem like the sort of thing that could happen, doesn’t it?