A RIP VAN WINKLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 May 1928, Page 3

A RIP VAN WINKLE

22 YEARS IN AN ATTIC. A Yugoslav Rip Van Winkle has just been discovered in a Slovenian village not far from the Italian frontier (says a correspondent of the “Observer”). Twenty-two years ago one Frania Kreiner, a local squire, young, handsome, dashing, the delight of drawing-rooms—so all the old people of the district say—suddenly disappeared. It was known that he was hopelessly in love with a Viennese beauty, and the rumour spread abroad to the effect that he had gone abroad to heal his lacerated heart was easily accepted. His house stood deserted and the roof began to sag and the plaster fall away from the walls; and at last one of the inheritors of the property has thought it high time to establish Kreiner’s death and salvage what is left of the house. However, when the police went to the house, they found, in one of the attics, Kreiner himself, an old man with a flowing white beard. He had spent twenty-two years shut in that room, living on bread that a very old servant brought him. Naturally, his sanity was questioned, but the commission which has just examined him gives the opinion that, although he is eccentric, he is sound in mind. His hermit life has been due to the effect of disappointed love. Keiner’s isolation has been complete. He had scarcely any notion of a, motor-car (they had hardly penetiated to his district in 1904), and none whatever of flying; still thought the capital of his country was Vienna, and was astonished to hear that the Emperor (Franz Joseph 1 is dead. The, uniforms of the Yugoslav gendarmery officials and the clothefe of the doctors who examined him he is said to have found exceedingly amusing. Perhaps because this amusement has given him a new zest in life, he now declares that his hermit days are

over. Presumably his heart has been cured by twenty-two years’ isolation; but since the slight change in men’s clothing proves really exhilarating to him, care has so far been taken to preserve him from a view of modern female fashion. He left the word, it must be remember, when waists were high, skirts Avere long, and sleeves as big as Zeppelins. He has heard nothing of the Great War and treats his automatic change of nationality with true ascetic scorn.