£100,000 LEFT BY RECLUSE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 15175, 14 December 1912, Page 2 (Supplement)

£100,000 LEFT BY RECLUSE.

WOMAN'S HOARDED GOLD.

I PIANO STUFFED WITH A FORTUNE. All the characteristics of a personage in Dickens and Balzac are said to have been possessed by a, Bussian woman recluse, who died leaving a piano stuffed with gold, and packages containing portions of a fortune concealed amongst rubbish in her wretched dwelling. It appears that the authorities of St. Petersburg are at present engaged in distributing the sum of £100,000 which has just been bequeathed to about 200 churches and monasteries by the provisions of a complicated will. The money was accumulated by an old woman, Mdme. Kolobova, who was thought to have died a pauper, and, indeed, was buried as such, but subsequently it fell to the duty of tho police to search her rooms, as there was talk of a fabulous hoard said to be hidden in the kitchen. In clearing away a quantity of old newspapers and piles of rags they discovered that what they had thought was a fairy tale was really more than true. In almost every nook and cranny they came across packets all very tightly and neatly bound up, some of which contained banknotes, and others share certificates or title deeds, whilst in the piano, an old and worthless instrument, they discovered quite a number of rolls of gold. After considerable difficulty the history of the recluse has gradually been pieced together. Ten or twelve years ago, says the Standard, the woman had her sister living with her, -and. at that time, although something of a "peculiar person," was by no means hermit-like in her habits. Every Sunday she would receive countless priests, beggars, and Sisters of the Poor, and would have some money to give to I each. Since the death of her sister, howI ever, her door has been closed to ail strangers, and only her servant and her landlady ever set eyes on her. It is said that during all this time, and for several years before, she made it a rule never to open the windows. She prided herself that she. never washed. As a rule she prepared her food herself with the aid of a lamp placed on the piano, and in her very last days she threw the unconaumed fragments into tho piano case. Every door was decorated with an assemblage of bolts and bars, so that the house was more like a prison than a dwelling-place, but as though these precautions were not enough, the miser had fixed up a double series of alarm bells on each door.