ECCENTRICS WHO MAKE RASH VOWS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2368, 20 July 1899, Page 55

ECCENTRICS WHO MAKE RASH VOWS.

If there is no limit to human folly, there is equally no limit to human perverseness, and many of the vows that rash people make are as foolish as they are perverse.

There was at least a pious motive in the strange vow which Mrs Williams, a Californian lady, made 18 years ago. Mrs Williams's husband, to whom she is much attached, lost his sight, and there was every prospect that the blindness would be permanent.

Mrs Williams prayed fervently for his restoration, and vowed that if her husband's sight were given back to him, she would crawl on hand and knees to a neighbouring church once a year, in token of her gratitude. Mr Williams recovered his sight, and once a year may be seen the strange spectacle of the devoted wife making her way^ on hands and knees, to the church, a journey of a quarter of a mile.

It was surely nothing buf- folly and obstinacy that inspired the vow of an old bachelor that he would never look on a woman's face again. In order to carry out his vow he had a high wall built around his house, which he never left, and substituted men for his women servants. Later, when new houses sprang up around his own, and his grounds were overlooked, he had them covered with a roof and artificially lighted. He kept his strange vow to the end of his life, which, however, came within seven years.

The most recent of these foolish makers of vows is a native of Brussels, who has sworn that -lie will make a tour of the world walking backwards. Tt is to be hoped that his fate will be happier than that of the man who swore that he would never rest until he could walk on the ceiling like a fly, and who lost his reason without gaining his wish.

There was "method in the madness " of the great French painter, Ziem, who vowed that he would never leave his studio until a certain important picture was finished. He gave instructions that he should be locked in his studio, and that the door should not be opened under any conditions, his meals to be handed to him through a hole in the door. Thus he worked for months- during the crisis thai ended in Napoleon's famous coup d'etal and his accession to the throne, of which Ziem knew nothing until his picture was completed and his door unlocked.

Another French artist, Gericauld, was equally determined to allow no distraction to interfere with the painting of his great picture, " The Wreck of the Medusa." He had his head shaved, and vowed that he would never allow his hair to grow until his work was done. This vow he religiously kept, in spite of strong temptation to break it, and the reward of his heroism was the most perfect painting of his life.

It was for a very curious reason that an old Jady, who died a few years ago. condemned herself to more than 30 years' confinement lo her housr. She had mnrried a widower, as miserly as ha was unromsntic, and, he insisted that his second wife should

wear the clothes loft bphind her by his first wife. The wife was j<s mutinous as the husband was resolute; and she determined that until shn could have her own clothes she would ntver leave the house; a vow she kept until her death.

toward J. Cunningham, who was receutly released from San Quentin, the State prison of California, after serving a sentence of six years' imprisonment for burglary, was one of the strangest of convicts. The vi-vy moinenb that he entered the 'prison portals he turned to the sheriff and swore a mighty oath that he would never speak another - word until his sentence had expired

Every effort was made to make the convict speak, but no threats or punishment had the. slightest effect on him, and he never spoke again until he had passed out of the prison, six years later, a free man.

A story is told of a young man in the Midlands, a great chess enthusiast, who was so annoyed at his failure to solve an apparently simple problem that he vowed he would neither sleep nor eat until the solution was found. He shut himself up in a disused room, and was found four days later by his relatives, terribly emaciated, and out of his mind. He spent a. year in a lunatic asylum as the result of his rash vow, and the problem remains unsolved.

Woman appears to be at the root of many of these eccentric vows ; for it was a hatred of the sex that impelled a once_-,well-known lawyer to swear that he would never speak to a woman again as long as he lived. Nothing would induce him to see a lady client; and he would never conduct a case in which a woman appeared as witness. He never employed a female servant, and deliberately "cut" all his lady acquaintances.

The inevitable result was that the men deserted him, his practice dwindled; and he died, less than a year ago, alone -and untended, in a squalid room in Dalston.