SOLD FOR A SONG.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXI, Issue 2260, 20 April 1926, Page 6

SOLD FOR A SONG.

MONEY SOLD FOR A FEW SHILLINGS. A cottagers's experience not longago should serve as a warning to those who hide away their savings in secret places rather than place them in the bank (says the "Sheffield Weekly Telegraph.") While this man was away from home his wife sold a couple of old pillows to a travelling feather merchant, and was very glad to get three shillings and sixpence for them. On his return, the man, instead of being pleased with his wife's bargain, flew into a violent rage, and told the astounded woman that the three and sixpenny pillows contained his life's savings--four hundred pounds in gold and notes. Distracted, the man rushed out of the house in search of the merchant, whom he did not find for nine hours. Having found him at last, the cottager tremblingly asked to see the pillows, and drew from one of them the box containing' his hoard. The dealer had been sitting on them all day, and had remarked on the hardness of them! A furniture dealer the other day had a novel exper ence of selling two hundred pounds of his own money for a few shillings. Soon after he had sold a mattress to a customer she returned carrying a cash-box full of money. She had found it on unrolling the mattress, and the shopkeeper recognised it as his own. What had happened was that the shopkeeper's wife, on being told not to leave the box where burglars might find it, had gone into the storeroom and slipped it into the mattress, and forgotten to tell her husband of its whereabouts. French peasants are notorious for their habit of hoarding money in preference to banking it. A game-keeper turned his hoard of gold into notes and stuffed them down the barrel of a sporting gun which hung on the wall of the kitchen. Next morni.ng on seeing a hare run across his garden, the gamekeeper forgot all about his savings, and fired the gun at it, blowing his money into shreds. Secret hoards have been a drawback, too, in that their owner may die and leave no word to his heirs of the whereabouts of the money. When a wellknown London Coroner died his library was sold tc a .firm of dealers, who found anomg the volumes a box shaped like a book. On its beingopened the box was found to contain a large sum in bank notes. The existence of the money was quite unknown to the widow, and she fainted with surprise on being told of it. For half a century a hoard of £3OO lay doi'mant, unknown to the family who should have enjoyed it, and its ' presence was only revealed by a strange coincidence. While "swatting" a fly with a book a woman hit the wall with such force that she broke the wall facing and revealed a recess that had been covered over with a thin board. In it were notes amounting to £3OO, which must have been hoarded there by the woman's father fifty years before.