SOME GOOD BARGAINS ACQUIRED BY LUCK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XXVII, 25 December 1897, Page 853

SOME GOOD BARGAINS ACQUIRED BY LUCK.

Some years ago, before Eastern Siberia was known to contain some of the richest alluvial mines in the world, a small mine was sold for a bottle of spirits. Before it was worked out. says ‘London Rocket,’ the mine yielded over thirteen tons of gold, which at £3 9/10 per ounce, would be equivalent to eight hundredweight. three quarters, seven pounds and eight ounces weight of £5 Bank of England notes, or, in other words, the bottle of spirits turned out to be worth £ 1,817,088 to the individual who parted with it for the mine. Not very long ago the papers contained a paragraph to the effect that a person who shot a little auk in Lincolnshire, being ignorant of its value, sold it for a pint of beer. Subsequently we were told that a large sum had been refused by the purchaser for .the bird. Had the individual accepted the ‘large sum’ offered him he would have made an excellent bargain, for the little auk. or the Arctic species of that bird, is not at all rare on the east coast whenever gales and severe weather are imminent. The man who accepted the beer was apparently not so ignorant as people thought. Lord Salisbury, it is said, holds his land in the neighbourhood of Charing Cross on lease from the Crown on verv ease

terms, an ancestor of his, 250 years ago. who evidently had an eye for a bargain, having secured five acres of laud at 10/- an acre for 500 years. Xot at all a bad deal ! One does not look for light or particularly interesting reading in consular reports, but from one hailing from Lorenzo Marques we cull the following example of a 37.500 per cent, profit : ‘A Immlv of financiers hailing from Johannesburg paid £30,000 for a stretch of sand of about eight acres in extent, which some years earlier had come into the |»ossession of the vendor for no more, it is said, than £Bo.’ The report further says that although at present out of the town, before very long the land will doubtless l>e found to lie well within the best residential quarter of that city. Perhaps the purchasers had in their mind’s eye the example of Peter Minnit. who, some years ag^ —270. as a matter of fact —purchased an island from the guileless savage for £5 worth of trinkets and beads, which to-day is worth about 240,000,000 times as much as Peter gave for it. The island in question is that of Manhattan, upon which New York is built. Picked up for a trifle in Italy among a lot of old furniture at the beginning of the century. Raphael’s famous work, ‘The Three Graces,’ had a strange financial career. For six months it was offered to the authorities at the Louvre for £3O. and when they refusefl it and it was put up for auction in 1882, £24 was the highest bid made, and it was withdrawn. Eventually its discoverer got rid of it for £l5O. When last put up for sale it passed into the possession of the Due d* Au male, who gave £25.400 for il and the article was bequeathed by him to the French nation, who had refused to give half a dozen £5 notes for it three-quarters of a century before. Surely this is one of life's little i ronies.