HETTY GREEN DEAD.

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 158, 4 July 1916, Page 6

HETTY GREEN DEAD.

RICHEST WOMAN IN THE %■■ t "WOKI-B. I

ESTATE OF TWENTY MILLIONS. •

'■ (Received 12.30 p.m.) . ■■ ''- j NEW YORK. July 3. •. , The death is announced of Mrs. Hetty'"' , Green, the richest woman in the worli •". , Her wealth is reputed to be twenty ■' J million pounds, of which she inherited' : ' two million from her parents. A son, . Colonel Green, and a daughter, Mrs. -;';■ Wilks, inherit the fortune. Mrs. Hetty Green, America's greatest ' ■woman financier, was. nne of New York's • , most famous figures because of her ' wealth and peculiatjties. She was born in 1835, and her nusband, Edward H. • Green, died fourteen years ago. "Such i a lonely little figure?" wrote a New York correspondent recently. "A ,' i withered, leaf, it seems strangely tossed t in the great financial current of Broad- : ■way. Follow this little old woman in , rusty black and see her enter the Ghemi-. cal National Bank. She is not the -, > charwoman. The charwoman has no ! clothes of such ancient date as hers; the alpaca gown that has weathered many l , seasons, the black woollen cape that haa ■- shaped itself to the shoulders as they : have bowed through the last ten years, and the tousled bonnet, with its little bunch of flo-wers that faded with the : \ millinery of many summers past. The shabby little old woman is worth £20,000,000 some estimates say: she is ■ '.'. Hetty Howland Robinson Green, great- •■■'.'.■ est mistress of finance the world has '• ever seen. She has more ready money at her command than any one mdi- •! vidual. Wall Street waits on her cof-.i.lv ■fers. To her old-fashioned mahogany ■:; desk comes a procession of bank presi- ■„:.■ dents, hat in hand, railroad magnates, •;:•. bowing low, and rich directors humbly ■t: making obeisance. Even the city, oi-.i New York, in need, has brought its plea -:A to her, its richest citizenness. Coolly, ■ calculating, she listens, balancing want V and entreaty with a firm nicety of judg- 7' ment. Then she drives her bargain. , shrewdly. Yet Hetty Green is really a bankrupt V to-day—in desire. With money to buy ' all the world holds for sale, it yet hold 3 nothing that she would like. The girl stenographer who takes her dictation probably has a lighter heart under a new . spring gown. Poor Hetty Green, least : happy woman in New York! The mention or her name raises a smile at her, .. persimonious eccentricities. ". It was not always so. Once Hetty 5-", Green was young, brilliant, and. beautiful, one of the belles of New York and --' ' Saratoga society. The eligible men of •'•.<•"/• the day were all at her feet. From this portrait of Hetty Green ...< j look at the Hetty Green of to-day, with the faded eyes that are done with sweet I smiling, and the grim mouth, hard with the stern lines about it. Beginning with romance and ending with pathos— I stranger far than any fiction is the chronicle of this woman's career. Though •-'■' she now lives like a pauper because she , prefers to. she comes of a fnani'lv that . > has had social position and riches un- ~ . .'' j limited for generations. She reads her I title clear to the Mayflower passenger .!, I list, and her ancestral shield is starred with colonial governorships. New England, to this day, smooths its apron, complacently, and adjusts its spectacles ~ proudly as it adds: "She is a Robinson of the Howland-Robinson line, and a Howland of the Round Hill Howlands, ; you know!"