THE GLOBE. THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 1880. OUR LONDON LETTER.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1839, 15 January 1880, Page 2

THE GLOBE. THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 1880. OUR LONDON LETTER.

[Written Expbbsbly fob the " Globe."] LONDON, Deoember 4.

For once I must praise the weather in this oountry, though, personally, I do not enjoy it. It haß fulfilled all the expectations that were formed of it. The prophets told us some months ago that, according to the very rare precedents of such a disastrously wet summer, we should be prepared for a winter of unusual length and severity, and we are having it. The usually wild foggy November was this year clear, bright and ©old, and ended with an increased frost, and this letter leaves a country bound in snow and ice. All kinds of outdoor work have been entirely suspended for a week past, with no proapeot of speedy renewal, and the traffic in all but a few of the principal city streets is carried on with difficulty. I recollect only one of the seasons which the prophets rely on for precedent, and that is nineteen years ago, the other being very much earlier in the century—" long before I was thought of," as the saying ia. I have a vivid recollection of what I suffered in the winter of 1860, and how great was the distress that prevailed throughout all the large towns of this land. If we may judge by the past three or four weeks and calculate upon a natural increase of severity during the next seven or eight, this winter will very likely exceed in bitterness that which most middle-aged folk regard as the hardest winter they ever knew. I dare say you in New Zealand are having a time of magnificent hot weather, for all over Europe the same conditions jprevail as in England, and people who have money enough to flee from the cold have this winter to go very far afield. There is no mild spot to be found now on this side of the Alps, nor for some distance beyond them. But then everybody declares that this is seasonable!

One branch of trade has good reason to be thankful for this severe weather, viz., the dealers in all kinds of skins and furs. For some few winters past there has been a growing fashion in London for ladies to be ornamented with more or less fur, but now almost every woman ia wearing at least a tippet. The great rage is for sealskin, and every lady who can afford thirty or forty guineas for the best of all wrappers now envelops herself in a paletot of Alaska fur. A cheaper article can of course be obtained, for the German manufacturers have just produced a very good imitation of seal fur, and it is sold at a few shillings the yard. It passes very well in the moderate light of our winter afternoons—we only had eleven hours and a half of sunshine during seven days of last week—but put it to your face and you can instantly tell the sham, for the real seal has an odour that is unmistakable, and a cosiness of softness and warmth that is inimitable. But of course all this " seasonable" weather brings with it a great increase of illness, and even the Queen herself has not been able to escape a violent cold, which obliged her favourite physician, Sir William Jenner, to stay at Windsor Castle for three or four days. Since laßt Saturday her Majesty has not been able to take her usual 'constitutional" on the terraoes of the castle, and when the papers announced, on Tuesday, that the Queen was so ill as to be obliged to send for her doctor, every one seemed to recoiled, with a eommon impulse, that it was the first day of a month which haa proved veryjfatal to our royal family. However, I am glad to say it was nothing worse than a bad cold, which is rapidly being shaken off.

Our bellicose little rivals, the editors of the " Telegraph " and of " Truth," have not yet settled their differences, nor do they seem likely to. As regards Mr Laweon, there is hardly anything to be said, for he has been remarkably quiet since his cross-examination was stopped by the Magistrate. Mr Labouohere, however, has a great many irons in the fire, He moved the Queen's Bench for a mandamus to compel Sir R. Carden to allow him to crosß-examine his opponent with a view to prove the truth of the libel which was charged against him, but the Judges would not grant him that, and it was evident that his making an agreement with the other side to go to the superior Court on this question was a false move, and the Judges were not slow to point out to him that the Magistrate had never refused to do that which they were asked to compel him to do. So he has again gone before Sir R. Carden, who has committed him for trial. Then he has done battle with the committee of the Beefsteak Club. Mr Lawson voluntarily withdrew from that little coterie, but Mr Labouchere would not, so the committee called a meeting of the members and voted his expulsion. But this assemblage was found to be irregular in many respects, so to Court again went Mr Labouchere, and this time he was the winner. But all this is not doing either of the parties much good, nor the public either. Yet two of our daily papers are publishing full reports of all these legal frays, for Mr Liwson is a pa! t-proprietor of the "Telegraph," and Mr Labouchere is a shareholder in the " Daily News." Mr Labouchere, too, has just been mixed up in another very doubtful matter. He, his wife, Mrs John Wood, the popular authoress, and some other fashionably philanthropic people clubbed some money and started the Belgrave Steam Laundry, which has proved a failure, and last week Mr L'ibouohere was sued in a County Court for money due to one of the persons employed in it. Ho got a compliment from the Judge for his ingenuity, but the verdict went against him. Is there not a proverb about not washing your dirty linen in public ? The Judges are determined to repress all the wtsVdy papers which make a traffio in lying acd slanderous personalities. ABanothor example they have justsent one, Mr Mortimer, to prison for three months for publishing an etrocious libel. Mr Mortimer, who is an American by birth, haa been for some years the proprietor and editor of a penny weekly called the "Figaro," which is, in those respects wherein it is a copy of its famous Parisian prototype, a very poor and weak imitation. A few months ago he made the acquaintance of Mrs Weldon, a lady whose name was mentioned in these letters some months ago. She is the wife of a gentleman holding a high position in one of the Government offices. He some time since found she was becoming deranged in her mind, and on proper advice sent her to an asylum, from which she escaped. Ever since then she has plagued all who know her by her craze about the amendment of the Lunacy Liws, and she prevailed on Mr Mortimer to open the columnß of his paper to her contributions, for she is a very clover woman, and has many considerable gift a. One of her articlas was a rampant attack on Mr Weldon and his friend Sir Henry de Bathe, a general officer in high command, and she went the longth of saying that her husband wished to get her out of the way in order that he might have the opportunity of marrying Sir Henry's daughter. Of course a criminal prosecution for libel followed, and then Mr Mortimer pleaded that he knew nothing of the article until weeks after the paper was printed, he havirg left all the work that week to his sub-editor, who found that America suited him hotter the moment a warrant was out against his employer. The Judge, however, with a view to prevent the future publication of such attacks on individuals, sentenced Mr Mortimer to three months' imprisonment, to pay a fine of one hundred pounds, and to enter into a recognisance to be of good behaviour for a further period of nine months. Mr Henry Brougham Farnie, a middle-aged gentleman, who has long been known, and

favorably, to literary and dramatic circles in London as a very clever adapter of plays from the French, and an author of many of the lighter pieces in the operatic forms of amusement, has just become the unhappy hero of a domestic drama of his own, and is lit ly to become the unfortunate victim of a conflict of the different laws of marriage and divorce which prevail in England and Scotland. Being a Scotchman, and resident in his native •0' n'ry, he, in 1861, went to Aberyswith in Wales, where he married a Miss Daviea. He took her back to So >tland, but they lived together only a short time, 'n in December, 1863, she obtained from the Court of Session a complete decree of divorce, and has since married again. Mr F rnie then came to London, where he became acquainted with a Miss Alethea Harvey, whom ho married in May, 1865. In the certificate of this second marriage he was described aB a widower, but he explains this by saying that it was a conclusion jumped at by the clerk who asked him whether ho had been previously married, to which he simply replied that he had. The second wife only lived with him three years, when, on learning that his first wife was alive, she left him, and it has taken her eleven years to find out where the first marriage toek place. The Court of Session, it seems, grants a divorce on much smaller grounds than one can be obtained in England, and the whole question turns upon the point whether a divorce granted in one country is legal in the other. The second wife haß petitioned the English Court for a divorce, so that the whole matter will be argued before a tribunal specially qualified to deal with it. If they grant the second wife a decree, Mr Farnie, it is admitted on all bands, will be entitled to go back to Scotland and marry a third wife. Although the Divorce Court has not iiud before it this season one really firstclass case, it has, I am sorry to say, been very busy with affaira of a less degree of interest. None of these call for any detailed notice, and they only serve to impress one with the perhaps too evident truth of how many ill-matched couples there always are in this country, and how very much better it would have been had they never been joined in matrimony, but repented in time aB Mr Tarbox did. About four years ago, when he was a very young man, he went into preparation for the Baptist Ministry, and became a student at Kilburn College, in the northwestern suburb of London. Of course he attended the Baptist Chapel at Kilburn, which was in the charge of the Kev. Mr Hall, who had a daughter, Mary Esther. The young folks were introduced to each other in the most beooming fashion, and they speedily became "engaged," to the satisfaction of the parents on both sides. That they were deeply in love with each other there is no doubt, for Mrs Hall told Mr Baron Pollock this week that when she went into one of her room» ahe found Mary sitting with Tarbox on the sofa; his arm was around her waist; her hand was in his, and her head was resting on his shouldor— which, I believe, ia the orthodox as well as the Dissenting style of courtship. But a study of St. Paul's epiatlei seems to have impreased young Tarbox with the notion that it was not fitting for a Baptißt Minister with a small stipend to marry, though his father would have given him some money derived from a profitable law stationery business. So he took away the engagement ring he had given her, and she brought an action for breach of promise, but on the advice of Mr Baron Pollock they settled the matter amicably, and I cannot tell you how much damages she got. Myßterioua disappearances have of late been rather common, but it is very rarely that one hears of any of thesß missing ones being found. A singular case, however, has just come to light, which shows how oddly such an event may happen. It seems that last October twelvemonth one Randolph Payne was staying with some friends at an hotel at Barmouth, a watering place in Wales. He oeemed to be as happy as a young man could possibly be, and none but himself and his creditors knew of the difficulties he was in. He came to the conclusion that he must escape from the sight of those who had trusted him, and this is how he accomplished that task. Dressing himself one morning in two suits of clotheß, and providing himself with an extra pair of boots.he ostentatiously walked out of the hotel with towels in his hand, as if he was going to bathe on the shore. He took off one auit of clotheß, made them up into a neat pile on the sand, and placed his towels and shoes by the side of them ; then putting on his other boots he walked away, and has never since boon seen in this country. Everybody supposed he had been drowned ; all his friends went into mourning, while his father took out letters of administration, and obtained payment of a sum of money for which Eandolph's life was insured. However, this year one of his friends, Mr Donald Drysdale went to the United States, and had to spend three or four days in San Francisco. One day in the street he was surprised at meeting Eandolph Payne, who thereupon made a clean breast of the whole affair, and requested that it should not be made public in England. However, it has come to light, because the letters of administration had to be revoked, and the Judge of the Probate Court has resolved to be more particular in future.

A man named Keeling, who was respectably connected, and had a good start in life, but would go wrong from what seems an innate criminal propensity, has just come to a tragic end. Some few years ago he lived in Glasgow, where he suffered eightean months' imprisonment for a robbery. On hia discharge he oame to London, where he made no attempt to obtain a freßh start in life, but took to courses more evil than before. He smashed the window of a jeweller's shop in Camben Town, and wbb caught in possession of some of the things he had snatched from the cases. For this he was sentenced to fifteen months' imprisonment, in addition to which he was ordered to pay the prosecutor the sum of £lO, as compensation for the goods which were either lost or stolen by others at the time of the robbery, or to have three months longer. When the fifteen months hard labor had been fulfilled, it waß found that through an error in the warrant of committal, he could not be held in custody any longer. Keeling had intended to pay the jeweller and to go back to his native city, and for this purpose he obtained from his friends in Glasgow post office orders for £ls. But when he found that the law had no further hold on him he offered the jeweller an I O U for the amount, stuffed the post office orders into the toe of one of his boots, and set forth to enjoy his new freedom. Within two hours he was drunk, and when evening came on he tried in vain to get a lodging. Nothing can be found out about him from nine o'clock that night until two next morning, when he waa found dead in the etreet, having climbed up a ladder to the roof of a houae, from which height he fell to the pavement boneath. It will never be known whether he contemplated burglary, or whether he climbed the ladder in a drunken freak.