A STORY OF REAL LIFE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13839, 27 August 1908, Page 8

A STORY OF REAL LIFE.

Sir,—"A Short Story" in a recent i**n* is clever, and perhaps it is frequent in London with its wide surface is a form of life in the Greater Babylon. Living in Loudon from 1842 till 1876 I knew noma eases of similar fraud. A lady there had a servant who told her a similar tale of herself. Happily she escaped marriage, but was almost caught. A well-dressed and rathe! high-toned man courted her, said he had an income of £500 a year as a settled thing jf but he would not tell what his trade was. for, h< said, he had none, but was a solicitor. Bo« I fore the wedding day at Kennington, scut of London, she followed ,at a distance bet would-be lover to Islington, in the extreme north of the great metropolis. There he* bright and once handsomely dressed man suddenly slipped down out. of an alley, dark and dirty, clothed in dirty rags, his toes out of liia boots, and tied up round the neck and. jaws with blood-stained cloths! Our servant* girl spoke to him in his mendicant attire, and said to him, "Ah! I've found you out, and you arc a street, beggar! 1 cannot marry you, of course." " Well," said tho beautiful lover, " I make about- a pound' sterling a day by begging, and I told yon that I had no trade, hut was a solicitor, What is begging but being a renl solicitor?'' he said F.L,.