The Golden Pin in the Heart

The wife of a newly admitted freemason noticed that her husband had stopped going to church and concluded from this that he had joined the masons. She wished to extricate him from that dangerous society, and so one day she forced her way into the assembled lodge and insisted that they release her husband. After long refusal the grand master showed her a book in which on every leaf the name of one mason was written and his heart painted beside it; between every two leaves of that book lay a golden pin. And the grand master told the woman to prick her husband's heart with the pin, by which he would at once cease to be a mason. The woman did so, and a drop of blood welled from the heart. When she came home afterwards, she found her husband dead on the floor — with a golden pin in his heart.