MR GLADSTONE AND PRESIDENT KRUCER

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XXI, 23 May 1896, Page 589

MR GLADSTONE AND PRESIDENT KRUCER

The careers of Mr Gladstone and President Kruger have been in one respect, at least, analogous. Mr Gladstone has been deprived by accident of a finger, and President Kruger has lost a thumb. Mr Gladstone, who lost his finger early in life by a shooting misadventure, has only once, so far as we are aware, referred in public to the disaster. On the 23rd November, 1877, in a speech in the schoolroom at Hawarden in denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities, Mr Gladstone observed :—• The absence of pain sometimes amounts to pleasure. It was once my fate to have a finger cut oil', and I recollect perfectly well that when the surgeon ceased to hack me about I was more delighted than lean express. I thought I never experienced so lively a pleasure.’ When President Kruger lost his left thumb (which was shattered when he was a lad, by the bursting of a gun) no surgeon * hacked him about,’for there was none in the remote settlement where his parents lived. The future President took out his pocket-knife and unflinchingly cut off the thumb himself at the joint.