TWO OLD STAMPS

Evening Star, Issue 21718, 12 May 1934, Page 5

TWO OLD STAMPS

Two old stamps have made a rich women of a lady clerk in Frankfort-on-the-Main, who a few years before had lost her work in a chemical factory and had since been suffering the sad lot of the unemployed. By chance an acquaintance discovered among her gran father’s old papers two rare stamps from British Guiana bearing the date 1850. He immediately took them to Paris, where it was established that they were in truth two exceedingly well-preserved specimens of a stamp .so rare nowadays that only tent of the kind are known. Not long ago 110,000 francs were paid for a much poorer specimen. The rest was easy. Half a day’s excited interchange of cables between .Paris, London, New York, and Frankfort resulted in the stamps being sold, and the penniless clerk found herself the thrilled possessor of a fortune. THE KING OPENS HIS LETTERS We like to think that of all the letters King Gustaf of Sweden opened on Ins seventy-fifth birthday he was most pleased with the one beginning: “ Darling, can you meet me this evening at the usual rendezvous t” Pleased, but so surprised that lie looked at the envelope again, and found that this loving message was not lor him after all, but addressed to a sailor on the warship Gustaf the Fifth. The letter was marked strictly private, and that is why the secretary had left it unopened when dealing with the correspondence. The King did not attend the rendezvous, but the sailor did, for King Gustaf opened no more of his letters till he had dictated a telegram telling the captain of the ship that the sailor was to be given leave that evening. It must have been a very puzzled captain and a still more bewildered sailor, for neither could understand the King s sudden interest in this particular subject. Not until the story came out in the papers did the sailor’s sweetheart know that she had addressed the King as darling; but if we know anything of women she has since remarked: “ Well, he certainly behaved like a darling,”