TRAGEDY OF TWO SISTERS

Evening Star, Issue 19198, 15 March 1926, Page 5

TRAGEDY OF TWO SISTERS

FAMOUS BEAUTY IK PAUPER’S GRAVE.

Miss Louise Clarke, who sixty-liye years ago was one of the most beautiful and talented of old Montreal society leaders, lias just been buried by charity in Mount Royal Cemetery. At the age of eighty-five she died in penury at the Moor Home for Old People, leaving in the same institution her sister Adclo, who, at the age of ninety-live, still retains memories of the days when the daughters of John Clarke, chief factor in the Hudson's Bay Company and partner of John Jacob Astor, were the most envied girls in the old city. There are still a few Montrealers who can remember the heyday of the Clarice sisters. Their beauty was renowned. They were musicians of talent, Louise possessing a lovely voice. They had innumerable .suitors, .Hut they never married. OCEAN TO OCEAN. The Clarke girls belonged to the fashionable liille group that were continually present at dances and receptions at the Chateau do Ramezay when Lord Elgin was Governor-General. Synonymous wifh the name of John Clarke are the dais of fur trading iu the early years of the nineteenth century. He was one of the first to traverse Canada, from ocean to ocean, and Ids movements in the North-west are described in Irving's ‘ Astoria.’

Many years later he returned to the North-west to enter the service of tho Hudson’s Day Company, in which he I’osc to he chief factor. Later he became ,Inhn Jacob Aster’s partner in tho establishment of the fur business from which grow the great. As tor fortune. After Clarke’s death, in PTW, the family fortune diminished rapidly, and Mrs Clarke (who lived to he ](l(Jj and the two girls became dependent on friends for their support, and later on charity.

Now Louise, the youngest, lies buried in a charity grave, and AdtTc, her sister, nearing the century mark, in a homo for the poor and aged, may soon he beside her.