A BRAVE BAKER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5551, 24 February 1886, Page 3

A BRAVE BAKER.

Under date of Dec. 18 a London correspondent writes : — " I turn to an incident which illustrates in a peculiar degree the kind of bull- dog courage that one occasionally meets with even in localities in which, if there is any fighting to be done, the policeman is generally expected to do it. If all householders could muster even a decimal share of the bravery recently displayed by Mr Nurse, of Wai worth, the enterprising burglar would speedily discover that the risks of bis professio n were provokingly large in proportion to the emoluments thereof, and the reflections growing out of that discovery might make him pause ere he deliberately apprenticed his favourite Bon to the same calling. Mr Nurse is a little man a good deal below the middle height, who was once a skipper of a vessel, but now, as father of a family, prefers homelife and a baker's shop. On Sunday morning he awoke with a sound in nig bedroom, and saw a fellow in the act of removing his watch from the mantel-shelf. Without a moment's hesitation, he sprang to the floor and attempted to grasp the thief, who, however, dodged him, ran down stairs, and got out at the back of the house with the watch in his possession before its owner could get hold of him. Mr Nurse, in his night gear, was in no condition to give chase out of doors, so the burglar, getting over a wall, dropped in the street, where he was run down, and after much trouble taken by the police, one of whom happened to see him alight from the wall without his boots,' which he had removed ere he began his work of spoliation. But when Mr Nurse turned back from his kitchen door, baffled by the escape, as he supposed, of the robber and the loss of his watch, he heard a sound in the parlour or front kitchen, and proceeding thence encountered in the darkness a second ruffian, on whom he at once laid a determined grasp. A conflict then ensued, which lasted full/ half an hour. The burglar was a big powerfully-built young fellow, but the sturdy old salt got him down three times, never losing his hold, although his ill-protected body was bruised all over in the desperate struggle. At one period of the fight the burglar viciously used his teeth, and at another he caught up a plate and broke it over Mr Nurse'B head, cutting his face cpen, and covering it with blood. At last a member of the family came with a rope, and while the man was down and partly stunned his legs were bound. By this time also an alarm wbb raised in the street, and the services of the police secured. The lower part of the house was seen to have been, ransacked before the more daring robbery from the upstairs bedroom was attempted, and, besides the watch, property to the value of about JEI3 had Immj appropriated by the two prisoners. The bravery of Mr Nurse has not only saved his own goods, but has, at the height of the burglary season, placed two old offenders in bafe keeping for some little time to come.

A woman was lately killed by lightning in a Btuall Virginian village, and since her death it has been discovered thai) a pane of glass in the window at which she was standing hM upon it an exact reproduction of nor featureß. Tho pano bears a perfect likeness of the dead woman ; a circumstance which serves to recall a case which occurred some time ago, when a boy who was struck down by lightning at his father's door was found to have upon his body an exact representation of the limbs and leaveß of the tree through which, the lightning had passed before it struck him. This boy recovered, and in course of years all traces of the tree portrait faded ftwav from his body