THE LONGEST COURTSHIPS ON RECORD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 7203, 14 September 1901, Page 3

THE LONGEST COURTSHIPS ON RECORD.

(Tit-Bits.) Last year the Hungarian village of Keeskeniat was the scene of a marriage between a bridegroom cf eighty-two and a bride of seventy-eight. • Although the couple had been "engaged for fifty years extreme poverty had prevented their marriage, and it was only when tihe. man. left that 'his end was near that he resolved) to leave at least his name to the woman he had loved so long. How unprofitable it is to wait for dead men's shoes must have been the experience of a couple who were not long ago married at Birmingham. When first betrothed they determined to wait until the deatb of the young man's father— then in a critical state of health— should place a sufficient amount of money at their disposal to enable them to buy a, small business. The proverbial creaking door, however, hung long on its hinges, and it was not until thirty-nine years had elapsed that the old. man's* decease enabled them to make an application to a clergyman to put up the banns. The abduction of eligible recruits was often put into requisition to swell the ranks of Fr«ter:ek <if Prussia's -giant Oenadi«rs. Almost on the eve of his wedding was Terence Flynn, a stalwart Irishman, kidnapped by craft and constrained to join that, celebrated regiment. During thirty years of virtual bondage, lie contrived, :it intervals, to let his fiancee know that his heart was still hers, and when at length, on contriving to reach his native land, he found that she, too, had been faithful, the long-postponed ceremony was celebrated. Though a. fifteen years' engagement is comparatively short, "the circumstances attendant thereon in the case of a Cincinnati couple make it worthy of note. Their long probation ...is duo, not to any indecision or di'latoriness on their part, but to their having never, during the whole- spa^e of fifteen years, been out of prison at the same time. Though Miss M was engaged 1 , plw> was loth, by being wed. to forego' the ardent letters which -she received from her lover, who. 100. was unwilling to stem the tide of hi? fiancee's amorous epistle. So their engagement, continued, while the correspondence, if it in time lost its passionate fervour, grew ever more essential to <t'be-ir happiness. Years passed, they ceased to be lovers, and would doubtless have died unwed, had not the lady, in her declining years, experienced a reverse of fortune, which determined her betrothed 10 fulfil the promise he toad niado nearly half a century before. Sisty-tnree yeai's ago John Morgan, a young man of twenty-two, who kept a drug-store in New York, became engaged to a girl «f seventeen. The couple were ambitious and sanguine, and, as John's business promised well, made a vow to wait until he had made 25,000d01. Then trade fell off, and, though he tried his hand at many things, the requisite sum

seemed as far off as ever, until two years since -a lucky speculation placed it at his disposal. TJie following week he married his fiancee, wtonu be ihad courted for over sixty years.