THE SNOWBALL PRAYER.

Marlborough Express, Volume XLI, Issue 96, 25 April 1907, Page 6

THE SNOWBALL PRAYER.

For some time (says the London Evening News) a mysterious document known as " the snowball prayer' 5 has been agitating the minds of hundreds of thousands of recipients in London.and other cities both in England abroad. Persons who received the prayer and refused to rewrite it and send a copy daily to other addresses were threatened with " some .misfortune,"' while those who carried out the instructions, were promised "great joy." Light is new beginning 'to dawn on this mystery. The "Throne," which offered £100 reward for evidence of the originator of the prayer states that " many hold that this latest craze is due to the latest instance of madness in the peerage.' 1 The paper relates the following amazing story:—On November 12 two Harley Street specialists in mental diseases were suddenly summoned to the homo of one of the fairest and youngest '■/peeresses in Mayfair. They found: their patient—who . had been mildly 'lunatic for half a year—^decideaiy -worse. Her distracted husband was in, danger of becoming-insane himself by the constant sight and souna of her madness, and her trustees and ' his family insisted that the poor lady mustbe placed in a private asylum and wfttched night and day. On the day of her seizure Lady A had spent over an hour in writing letters. Hitherto few restrictions had been placed upon her actions, and her letters were so generally found to be quite normal that they were not invariably examined. On November 10 she had given her nurse twenty-four envelopes to post addressed to friends and Acquaintances. On her escritoire there remained only one communication—this prayer and its correlated request. The history.of this case of lunacy dates back to the honeymoon which followed one of the most brilliant pro-Lent weddings of last year. Commencing with depression and lassitude, it ,took on a religious form during Father Bernard Vaughan's attack on Mayfair morals; and since that date the unhappy lady bemoaned the wickedness of her world, her own fate and her' husband's, and has spent much of her life in tears. This is the story that obtains credence in the West End, where a very large proportion of the earlier prayers were posted.