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Evening Star, Issue 16195, 17 August 1916, Page 6

In the early days of Oamaru—somewhere in the very early fifties—the father of an Oamaru business man of to-day was passing through the place on'his way to the CentTal Otago goldfields (says the 'Mail'). He found the accommodation so limited that he and a friend were obliged to sleep in a hut with a clay floor and only one item of " furniture," in the shape of an empty coffin. The traveller spread his blankets in the coffin,'his mate sleeping on the lid. Very many years afterwards, at a Timaru fireside, chance acquaintances were living again the hardy, free-and-easy old days, and one recounted how he had been unable to secure lodging in Oamaru, and, in search for a cover from the dew, had looked into an old hut. In it was a coffin, in which was a corpse Bitting reading and smoking. In a mild panic he'had fled from the spot, quite at a loss then or, later to explain the hallucination. Great was-his delight to learn that the man to. whom he was tolling the tale was the " corpse," and that what he had been reading was an aged pamphlet nicked jp on the floor,,