A SINGULAR CHARACTER.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 149, 12 October 1876, Page 2

A SINGULAR CHARACTER.

' Looking over some of the New York papers received by the last mail, 'writes the Maryborough and DunoUy Advertiser, we came across the following accotuat of the last days of that eccentric adventurer, Wemyss Jobson, who seemed to stand quite as good a chance at one time of becoming Chief Secretary of Victoria as Mr, Graham Berry did. Latterly, we are told, Wemyss Jobson was sometimes in cash, but generally out of it, and in his last years very shabby and horribly but unconsciously dirty, although he had fairly decent clothes to attend the Beecher trial in. The trial he reported for the London Times. He was a confirmed duellist in intention, and once challenged all the proprietors of a Sunday paper for retorting an attack he made in his correspondence upon Thomas Francis Meagher. It was finally arranged that he should fight General Gleason, of Fenian fame, but that fell through. His constant companion, the loaded cane, which he described as a "heavy Australian hunting-whip," got him about once a month into a street fight. He fought car-drivers, court-house loungers, and anybody who would step on his corns, The most marked of his hallucination! was, that he was the object of a gigantic conspiracy, and bound to be suppressed some day by violence. His adventures with the conspirators formed the subject of many letters to newspapers, which were sometimes printed. Then, next day, Jobson took possession of the office, deposited his shabby clothes on all its chairs, if it was summer ; laid his hunting-whip handy by ; ordered pen, ink, and papa from the boys ; directed that he should not be interrupted, and, with the most dignified air imaginable, sat till the pressmen turned him out next morniii| writing up the conspiracy. When he was rid of his hallucination and in cash—two events that usually came to gether—he was a good-natured and well behaved enough person, and had a regimenl of small street Arabs, boys and girls, were sure of coppers from him.