The Farmer's Wife and the Bachelor Neighbour.

Observer, Volume XIV, Issue 781, 23 December 1893, Page 2

The Farmer's Wife and the Bachelor Neighbour.

The Divorce Court at Wellington has again been engaged in undoing the work which a poetic license ascribes to Heaven. In this case the husband was the aggrieved party His name is John S. Watson, and he has a farm of 1200 acres at Kumeroa, near Woodville. He is a tall, athletic, and rather stolid looking personage of the Scottish persuasion. The co-respondent was Robt. Shaw, one of two bachelor brothers who occupied the farm adjoining Watson's. There were some striking consequences of his gallantry which Watson succeeded in bringing home to him so forcibly that Shaw has been induced to quit the colony in quest of fresh woods and pastures new.

According to the narrative which Watson poured into the receptive ears of His Honor the Chief Justice, he wooed and won his wife, the fair Cecilia, at Napier, in 1886. She was then a domestic servant, and Mr Paterson, Presbyterian minister, tied up the nuptial knot for them. For nearly six years, therefore, they lived a quiet life, marked only by the occasional breezes which :n the best regulated families ripple the surface of connubial bliss. No children, however, blest the union.

During the shearing season last year, the husband first began to suspect that he had rivals in the affections' of his wife. He remarked a singular partiality on her side for the society of Robert Shaw and another individual named E whom shearing had brought to the district. He noted with growing distrust that their nocturnal visits to his homestead were painfully frequent and free, that they invariably elected to depart by the back door instead of by the front, that his wife usually took upon herself with great alacrity the duty of seeing them out, and that there were always strange whisperings at the doorstep before the last good-night was said.

John expostulated with Cecilia on these little goings on, and Cecilia, of course, warmly replied that he was a nasty, jealous thing, who was allowing the green-eyed monster to blunt his common-sense and to make of him a laughing stock to the neighbours. However, John came of a doubting and hard-headed race, and he steadily kept his weather. eye lifting for fresh evidence. It came in various ways, and did not tend to reassure his mind. He determined at last to set a trap for all parties.

He Baddled his horse one afternoon, and made known his intention to go off on business to Maharahara, stop ihere for

the night and return the following day. But he did not go to Maharahara . He stopped at friend McDonald's, five miles off; and with true Scottish imperturbability smoked his pipe and bad a convivial 'crack' by the fireside until about 10 o'clock, then he shook himself together, mounted his nag, and, in a leisurely way, Bet off home again. He came in sight of his homestead about 11, unsaddled and turned his horse out, and proceeded to walk home. As he got within earshot of the house, he heard the strains of a concertina and the voice of his wife singing.

He knew the little entertainment had not been got up for his edification, and he made for an open drain near the door in order to watch the course of events. Ere he reached it, the door opened, and almost before he could drop into a shady spot the sportive Cecilia and the gallant Eobert Sbaw came out and lingered by the fence. According to Watson's account, they indulged in amorous dalliance of a kind which only some husbands could watch nnmoved. But Watson appears to have watched it. Then the pair of lovers retired inside, and Watson stealthily followed. He says he found them under circumstances which left no doubt in his mind as to their relations. The Watson blood had been rather long in firing up, but it was now blazing. Gore and hair began to fly— chiefly Shaw's. Cecilia took an active hand in the fray, and fought with such vigour that she got her husband down upon the floor and sat upon his manly chest while Sbaw girded up his loins and ' went ' at such a pace that he must have pretty nearly burst the record.

His next step was to prosecute Watson for assault, but the case was dismissed. Cecilia meanwhile had decamped, and never returned. Beport says she now bosses the cuisine in a distant pub. Watson only met Shaw twice afterwards, and the meetings were of a kind to intensify Shaw's desire to emigrate, if Watson's account of them is to be believed. The first of these meetings was in the public highway. Watson says. ' I called out to him, " Are you as good a bit of stuff as you were at Woodville," ' and then he added, as if it covered everything, ' I flattened him out.' When they next met they were each driving a mob of sheep, but Shaw did not stop for parley. He had urgent business elsewhere, and his sheep were left to take care of themselves. ' Now, had it been me,' remarked the grim Watson, ' I wouldn't have gone if it bad been the devil himself with Tom Sayers behind him.' The end of the whole matter was that the unsophisticated John got his decree nisi, while Cecilia's petition for an order of judicial separation was dismissed in default of her appearance.