LOCKED UP FOR 21 YEARS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 82, 3 October 1929, Page 21

LOCKED UP FOR 21 YEARS

A tale of how a girl, 27' years old, had been kept--in solitary -confinement by her parents for twenty-one years in the belief that she had developed the dread disease of leprosy, has been revealed by the police, say the Sacramento "Bee." The Soviet authorities freed tho unfortunate girl and established- that it was not leprosy from which she had been suffering, but a minor skin disease. " The girl,, in. spite of her youth,-was completely grey-hair-ed when discovered by the police, her face was shrivelled like that of a very old woman, and she was half blind and entirely undeveloped mentally. Her parents locked her in a barn twenty-one years ago for fear that if her disease, believed by them to be leprosy, were discovered, she would be driven from the-town with a hurling _"»f stones, as was the custom then. .This"custom, incidentally, still, exists in some sections of the country. The Soviet authorities were in the Tashkent district seeking information about a crime when they heard a human voice issuing from the locked barn. At first the parents refused to open the barn and resisted all the efforts of. the police to do it. Finally, however, they yielded. The astonished officials found what looked like an old woman, crusted with dirt, cowering in tho corner'on a heap of straw. - ..'■/.' , ■ .

-Motion pictures have been turned to a nsw use.. .. I'hotoscopy lias been invented. This is the art whereby books "and manuscripts are being translated to motion picture films by a French company. A story, for example, can be put on a screeu in a classroom for children, or some rare work can be purchased for a few francs in this form-by a bibliophile. The whole family would be able to read on an opposite wall a new'novel, without having to wait to have tho book passed around from one to another. The machine for taking these book films is called the photoscope, and the films themselves are scarcely larger than those employed for the vestpocket camera.