WOMAN'S WORLD

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 173, 1 November 1910, Page 6

WOMAN'S WORLD

(Conducted by "Eileen.") 130 LOVE LETTERS POETIC BREACH OF PROMISE CASE. TIk 1 love-letters of a naval engine-room artil'eer provided merriment at the bearin!.' of an action for breach of promise of marriage at Belfast. The plaintiff, Lydia ' Connor, was a nursery governess. Til defendant, Edward Albert Frost. v,-i~ attached to H.M.S. Drake. The action was undefended. The parties met on an occasion when the fleet was lyin.f at Bangor, County Down. The plaintiff paid a visit to the Drake, and Frost showed her over the ship. Subsequently they or nT ""I a correspondence, and the defendant cicspateked a letter to the young won an whenever his ship put into port. When at Portrush he wrote asking her to become his wife, and offering her a life's devotion. She accepted. There were, counsel =•"■', about 130 letters, and the jury c<-.ul form no opinion of the man's character without hearing some of these documents. The. defendant led the girl to believe that hii mother twas dead, but subsequently in-

ted her to the Isle of "Wight to meet his mother at Cowes. At another time he excused himself by saying that his brother had sustained a serious injury. Later he announced that he himself was ill. The young woman lurried to Cowes to co'isole him, and fo'.nd him and the brother walking arm-in-arm along the road. His mother told her '"'never * l% mind what Bertie said." ' A iiiV.,«,'r by the defendant, posted d j Gai\v:j'j 'ontained a quotation fr.~ Ternysoa A subsequent epistle furnisned orisri-ial verse, which Frost said he | composed v'liis working in the "black boh.' 1 Vvn?,i uiis you Ysaii you'll think of me When we are far apart; Yet may the name of Bertie be Engraved upon vour heart. —'(Lai;,... :). • .f £'S INCONSTANCY." ' The defendant referred to "the old .... lacy about 'Jack's Inconstancy.'" While writing, he said, he could hear some fellow in the ship singing "Eileen Alannah," as if his soul were in the song, and across sunny Spain and the vineyards of France he would send to her the words: My darling Eileen Alannah, Eileen Asthore, Pride of my heart and its queen evermore ; Faithful I'll be to the coleen I adore—

Eileen Alannah, Eileen Asthore. Another letter, addressed to "My dearest wife," contained these passages:— "I want you to try me in the future, to see how I want to make a full atonement to you for my past deceit and neglect. I know you cannot be happy without my love, because you love me so absolutely. With all my faults you still love me, and I can only marvel at the strength of your love, which overcomes all 'things and loves till death. Wife of my heart, love like ours renewed cannot be overcome." This letter was signed, "Your lonely, repentant boy and .your accepted husband and lover, Bertie." (Finally, the plaintiff received an undated letter addressed to "Dear Miss Connor," saying:— "I beg to inform you that I am not in a position to hold you to your promise to me. Your opinion of myself is of such a character that I really think, for both our sakes, it would be'best to discontinue our friendship." The jury awarded the plaintiff £75 damages.

PETTITCOAT PHILOSOPHY' When I was a little girl, I used to creep under the dining-room table and sit there looking up, transfixed at'the difference. A new angle of material vision, the sight of the other side of the shield, always gives me this pause. But whereas this other aspect of things used to be a delight, now, in life, I shrink a little from availing myself of certain revelations. I have a great wish to know things, but I would know them' otherwise than by looking at their linings. I think that even a window should be sanctioned in its reticences. To idle is by no means merely to do nothing It is an avocation, a calling away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body, and to let the spirit "keep on. Not everyone can idle. I know estimable people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle until the hour yields its full blessing.—Zona Gale.

Married life consists mostly of breakers, with here and there a patch of smooth water, which, when arrived at by the married voyagers, is rarely enjoyed, owing to their exhausted and seasick condition. Only anticipation and retrospection bring us absolutely unalloyed pleasure, because of the power w.e possess, and that has been given to most of us, of wiping away all sorrow from the past and seeing no pain in the future. Don't we all build castles in Spain? A goodly pile of fair stone and' marble and alabaster, without flaw or crack. No cheap glazed yellow bricks and unsatisfactory mortar, but a graceful monument showing up its pure outline against the blue of the sky.—Mabel| Barnes-Grtiridv. * |

J GREAT JEWEL FRAUDS. London files report that astounding jewel frauds runuino- into many thousands of pounds have been prepetrated upon leading Italian (inns bv a Medina postal clerk named llarullo'. The Italian Post Office has adopted a system whereby goods can be ordered at a distance payable on delivery. Marullo, who is employed in tin., <le])artment, tampered so cleverly with the detachable coupons.that his colossal misappropriations at the expense of the Government have «one on unsuspected for two Tears. Meanwhile, he is alleged to have been

keeping Eva Messeri. a young Messina woman of twenty, who had been aban- ; doned by her lover in the United States with a baby. Messeri passed as an American girl under the in me of Ida Lider, and was installed in an aristocratic villa in the environs of Mes< ; na, with servants, a carriage, and Ci-ery kind of luxury. As soon as official susp ; " ; "UJ had b»en a routed Marullo sen 1 b .• !\>iI ward with the chill and a i::v.! .■; Florence, where she was in bed in the middle of th > ir'.'l": :u a lirst-class i h'Hel. The i)'':. . c i opening the bag- ' ri'»e, risc'i 1 -'•(' to view a quantity of si; ten ir.v N ;\w\ flittering gems of the value i■' >.oi!'.l•'(, also bulky packets of bank notes. Marullo has also been ar-r-Tiiud. Both mistress and maid are charged as accomplices. The frauds are said to reach a total of £40,000. AMERICAN GIRLS AND ENGLISHMEN. Yet another attempt to explain the inexplicable. Carl S. Hansen has been worrying about the preference so many American girls show for marrying an Englishman, and he declares that the matter has nothing to do with breeding, or cosmopolitanism, or cultura. But he thinks he has discovered the secret in the Englishman's passion for dominance as compared with the American's passion for industry. So, he concludes, when the American girl has attained to the culture of forty years ago—the culture of the cultured world the world over—if she isn't a bit of an anarch (and «"b!, brainy won-an isn't?) and has been all ■but strangle' by the conversation of her brother. ■- '■ > knows nothing bevond her culture, ti' " would seem every reason for her to be interested in the Kn~I'«liman's views, with his strong po=iMvism, hi? bluntness that refreshes, his candor that amazes, his every-day opinions which never mince matters. Her is a modest chap, with a good <' )f tolerance about the thins: he kr >v!n nothing of, but the Englishman, w'hether he knows it or not. proves it. "This is a special charm of the Englishman—he makes you think. He is hospitable: he is ", gracious h~st; he is a good Tillow, and thoroughgoing—but so are other people; so are we. It is only where there is an opinion in the, air—no matte" what—that he brings h a fnn. 1 of new ideas, together with his habit of positivism, and leaves the American nii.es behind. He's the product of the environment that will rxrjke for to-morrow's bet"ter democracy Mr. Hansen shows his own breeding, comments the Argonaut, by ignoring the dollar ques/ion in his theory, but whether it is any nearer the trnM» for that omission who will say? T' ale mind has exercised itself so m. with this problem that it is time we heard from the American sirl herself. °

GIRL WHO LIVED IN A BOX. AN UNINVITED GUEST. Nothing stranger has been related recently in the London police courts than the escapade of a young girl in a house in West Kensington. The girl, Annie Belman, aged sixteen, appeared before the West London magistrate recently charged with being "a suspected person found on enclosed premises supposed for an unlawful purpose." "For a fortnight past," said Miss Muriel i,lgar to a reporter, "we have heard noises in the house, but we are not nervous, and we assumed that they were only the ordinary sounds one hears in a house, especially on a windy night, the creaking of doors and other disturbances. We had noticed, however, tkftt the bread' had been going for a fortnight past, and we could not understand its disappearance. "On Sunday afternoon the maid came running downstairs and said there was someone in her room, I went up, taking a police whistle with me, and looked under the maid's bed. No one was there, and I opened her trunk with my foot. I could see no one there, but I noticed a movement in the trunk.. I screamed and ran downstairs.

"In answer to the call of the whistle, a policeman came, and he, my mother and myself returned to the maid's room. There was nothing in the trunk then, so we went down to the next floor. There is an ottoman box there, and the policeman opened it. At first he saw nothing but a great mass of black hair. Then the figure inside the ottoman moved, and we saw that it was a girl. Poor girl! she looked more Like an animal than a human being. "At first we saw only her eyes showing through her matted hair, and her toes sticking up at the end of the ottoman. When we got her out she looked like a girl of sixteen, biggish for her a«e. Her clothes, such as they were, just'a blouse and a pinafore, and some rags, were very dirty. -She was quite dazed when we got her out of the ottoman, and rubbed her eyes as if she had just awakened from a long sleep." In answer to the questions of the astonished women and the policeman the girl said she had been in the house for a fortnight. Defective-Sergeant Taylor informed the magistrate that the 'girl had told him that she had been in the house for a fortnight, concealed by day in a box and prowling about the house by ni"ht