MARRIED AT 120

Grey River Argus, 3 June 1933, Page 7

MARRIED AT 120

SOME FRISKY CENTENARIANS. “Wli.il I want is work. Idleness " ill ruin my health. ’* said Zora, known in Constantinople as the '‘human packhorse.' ’ i<> an interview - '■i a few weeks ago. old is ihis amazing man that he was in his cradle when Louis XVI. oi France first put on his crown. When he was born. Wellington was a child of five, playing with his toys in his Dublin nursery; and Nelson was wearing his midshipman’s uniform in the East. Indies. He has lived to see the great War begun and emled 144 years after his birth. Zora had reached middle-age when Mrs. Ann Havkin, a Sheffield centenarian. was born. Mrs. Haykin was young enough to be his grandchild; but still she was a marvellous woman, for she though nothing of a six miles’ walk at I(<2 to see a friend, ami enjoyed her pipe as much as she did three-quarters of a century earlier. Of a Countess of Desmond we read that: •‘She lived to the age of one hundred and forty years, being able to |go on foot four or five miles to the nearest town; and not many years before she died she had all her teeth I renewed." she might have added more years to her life if she had not “climbed a nut-tree to gather nuts; and falling down, injured herself,’ 4 thus bringing on an illness to which she succumbed. Before Miss Elizabeth Grav died at Edinburgh, she could claim that she had seen lOS birthdays; that she had attended her father’s funeral a century before, and that one of her brothers had died 128 years earlier. Up to the last week of her life she was able to do the most delicate needlework without spectacles. Of a Cornish lady. Miss Stevens, it is said that, after her loot'i birthday, she rode twenty miles on horseback: and the Hon. Mrs. Hay Mackenzie, <>t Cromartie- who died at 103, < elebrat<‘d her last birthday by walking ten and entertaining a number of friends at dinner. And still mon' remark able was Mrs. Jane Scrimshaw, who. 'at the age of 103. walked Iren: L<m i don to Gravesend. Charles Macklin, the a<-tor. made; his last appearance on the stage, a-; Shylock, in his 100th year, when ‘‘ he [ played the part with all the vigor of a voting man.'' All these* records are thrown into eclipse by Thomas Darr, a farm-lab ourer. who married his first wile at eightv. ami his second at a hundred ami twenty; and al 152 (his last year of life) made* a Jong journey to Lon