MYSTERIOUS DI-APPEARANCE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 427, 27 September 1869, Page 3

MYSTERIOUS DI-APPEARANCE.

(From the New York Tribune.) A parallel to the celebrated Speke mystery has recently been brought to light by the discovery of a missing American gentleman in London. The Rev. Mr Speke, it will be remembered— a brother of the African explorer— left a comfortable English home without auy assignable cause, and, after all Great Britain had been for weeks in a turmoil over his disappearance, was discovered in a distant part of the kingdom, disguised as a drover. He seemed to be sane, and no satisfactory explanation of his vagary was ever made public. The American case i« strangely similar. Mr Edwin E. Colton, agent of the Adams Express Company, Springfield, ivf assachussets, left the house of a friend in Fifth street, New York, on the 20th of December, 1867, and from that time all trace of him was lost. His accounts with the company were found to be correct to the last cent., and no motive could be conjectured for his voluntary disappearance. All available means to find him were exhausted. At last, on the 20th of April, 1869, an acquaintance met him, dressed as a sailor, visiting the Tower of London. He gave a history of his adventures, but no explanation of his sudden desertion of wife, friends, and country. The day of his disappearance he had taken passage for Glasgow under an assumed name. He wandered about England for several weeks, and then shipped as a seamen on board a vessel bound for San Francisco. Thence he sailed to Calcutta, and from Calcutta to London. He knew of the excitement caused by his disappearance, but expressed no intention of coming home. Of course there may be circumstanc a both in the Speke and the Colton case whicli have been concealed from the public ; but why should we doubt that sane men are driven sometimes, by an impulse they cannot explain or analyse, to break out of the routine of a monotonous life and plunge into a new world ? When knighthood died, the vague unrest of chivalric adventure survived. When the anchoritism of the desert went out of fashion, there still remained in the human

i bosom that yearning for solitude, that irre[sistible desire to break away from the beaten path, which sometimes drove men to flee from family and friends into the solitude of the Thebaid, or the seclusion of the monastery. As the world grows- older, we walk more and more closely in one- another's footsteps ; the grooves get deeper, and it is harder to escape from them. But every now and then impulse gets the better of reason, and grown men, respectable clergymen, fathers of families, play truant like schoolboys, and perhaps hardly know themselves why they do it, or what they run away from, unless it be the wearying necessity of repeating to morrow just what they did yesterday and to-day. When we> are puzzled over mysterious disappearances,,it would be wise to remember how often people do strange things without any distinct motive — do them, in fact, merely because they are strange things, and they are tired of being reasonable. If such men had been differently placed in life, they might have won fame as daring pioneers or adventurous explorers. Mr Speke, with his brother's opportunities, might have opened another wilderness ; Mr Colton might have been a second Captain Cook. But accident — which is only another name for Providence— made the one a clerk and the other a curate, and so they are likely to be remembered (if they are to be remembered at all) as " queer " persons, of whom it may be an open question whether they were a little cracked or a little wicked.