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Otago Daily Times, Issue 18562, 24 May 1922, Page 6

A claim for a fee of half a million pounds is being made by a lawyer against Olga Humphrey, the actress, says a New York correspondent. After administrative and tax expenses in England and France to the amount of £400,(D0 had been deducted from her share of the estate of her late husband, the Turkish Prince Ibrahim Hassan, she had left a fortune understood to amount to £1,000,000. Of this, Mr Herman L. Roth, member of a New York law firm, now claims £300,000 for legal services rendered.' Mr Roth says that in 1914 he entered into an agreement with the princess by which he was to endeavour to obtain a divorce for her. Any sums realised from actions to be started in any part of the World were to be divided equally between them, and he has gone to California to try to collect the £300,000 he savs is due to hirn. Olga Humphrey was wellknown on the'London stage, having starred in the “Prisoner of Zetida” and other productions. She was divorced from her first husband, and then married Prince Hassan, who died in Paris in 1914, while divorce proceedings were ponding. Her third husband was a Captain Broadwood, of the British army.

Ihe old belief, so beautifully expressed by Shakespeare in the line, “Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” meets with hard bumps nowadays. Whether it ever did apply with any force to the sneak thief is open to question, but there are some consciences abroad of so peculiar a texture as to be impalpable in substance and yet apparently impervious to any prickings. Light and callous must have been the conscience, for instance, of the person who committed a theft from a grave at O’Neill’s Point cemetery last Sunday (says the Auckland Star). A bereaved mother was visiting the newly-made grave of a little one she had recently lost, and after tending it she walked away, leaving her handbag hanging on the railing of the plot. On reaching home she discovered the loss, and, recollecting where she had left it, immediately sent to recover the bag, which contained, in addition to several pounds in money, a number of other articles. When, however, the messenger arrived at the grave, the bag had vanished, and, despite the presence among its contents of an envelope bearing the owner’s name and full address, and the published offer of a reward, the finder has failed to find the owner. A theft of (his sort is the more contemptible seeing it must have been clear to the person who took the bag from the grave that it was left in the abstraction of a mother’s grief beside her child’s burial place.