GRADUATE’S “LOVE CURSE"

Evening Star, Issue 20255, 16 August 1929, Page 9

GRADUATE’S “LOVE CURSE"

LIVED AS VAGRANT OH BEING JILTED GAVE AWAY HIS FORTUNE. An amazing story of how a university graduate, a member of one of the finest families in England, gave away a fortune after being jilted by his sweetheart, and lived for twenty years as a vagrant, was revealed recently. The man was Joseph W. Hall, who has just died in America, where he went nearly thirty years ago. But for a firm of Worcester solicitors his body would have gone to the Philadelphia Anatomical Board. The solicitors, however, cabled that they would pay Air Hall’s funeral expenses and he was saved from the. last indignity. AMAZING LETTER. Before he died Air Hail sent to a lawyer an amazing letter, part of which reads:— “Love is like a dangerous germ. It is incurable. Aly romance has brought this horrible curse upon me. If you go bankrupt in love there is absolutely no relief in store for the nonsuited. A lost love will always be dead.” Air Hall left England for America with a fortune of £7,000. Having been jilted, he roamed the streets brokenhearted. He felt there was no alternative hub to mix with, vagrants, on whom he spent his money. His first companions wore picked up from bread queues in the New York Bowery. Air Hall spent his money like water.; His homo at most times was a workhouse, but, whenever lie had money, he either gave it to his fellow vagrants or squandered it. A lawyer in America often sent him ' money, hut only a little at a time, as lie knew it would go the same way as the rest. CULTURED TO THE LAST. All through his life, however, Air Hall remained a cultured gentleman. His letters were couched in perfect English, but were mostly pathetic. In one he said: “It is nearly all over with me. I have lain in ah old barn for a day and two nights, hut crawled out to-day. Doctors cannot help me. “1 live like a rat at the end of the river street, and yet I find time to compose poems in these most horrible hours of solitude and desperation. “In poorhonses here the moment you die, if yon ’ ve no friends or money, your body goes to the Philadelphia Medical College within twentyfour hours. This act does not trouble me in the least. “I have led the life of a dog, and I must die like a dog.” Time after time Mr Hal! was asked to return to _ England by his sisters, who are living in England. They offered to support him, but he refused. He had great hopes of inheriting a large fortune from a certain estate but intended to spend the money received from it as he had spent the other