Old Sweethearts Meet and Wed Two Hours Later.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIII, Issue XVI, 15 October 1904, Page 65

Old Sweethearts Meet and Wed Two Hours Later.

They met on the sands of the beach near the Cliff House in San Francisco just before the last mail left. As children they had been sweethearts in America. He drifted to South Africa and became a Kaffir king, a miner of fabulous wealth, and, incidentally, a husband. But he never forgot .Anita Mallory, his California child sweetheart. He accumulated millions in the Rand, but he was not happy. His wife and he could not agree. She drifted away from him. and he got a divorce. Tn the far land of the nether realms of Africa, with all his wealth, with all his power. Jim Burslem eould neither buy nor summon happiness. His dreams were of an American sweetheart, and last spring he came to America. In New York he learned that his Anita had married a Los Angeles banker. Hugh Glassell, and in an aimless and yearning frame of mind the rich young widower set out for the pacific coast. He had made up his mind that he would not seek out his old sweetheart of childhood, but he eould not resist the temptation to revisit the scenes of the early happiness of his boyish dreams. Ho went to San Francisco, got a room in the Cliff House, and. day after day. from his lonely window. watched the seals sporting on the rocks far cut in the harbour.

One day in the dining room ho saw a young woman who recalled bis childhood She was beautiful, distrait, lonely, and--she knew him. She smiled upon him. and in five minutes he was exchanging the experiences of a decade with the girl whose heart had been his for all that time, but whose life had been not less adventurous than his own. He learned that she, too, was alone in the world, her husband having crossed the great divide, and left her a widow a year previously. She had not forgotten the old, simple, guileless days of their childhood, nor had the years effaced or diminished the tender regard in which she held Lun. For half an hour they talked over the intervening years, and then he said: “Anita, we have both made our mistakes. We are sorry, are we not? But let us quit grieving and start it all over again. Let’s start right now. Let’s be married.” A sympathetic hotel clerk summoned Deputy County Clerk Baker, who accompanied the groom-to-be to the county clerk’s offive, where the license was made out. The Rev. John Rich, of the First Presbyterian Church of Oakland, was summoned, and within two hours after their meeting this lover and sweetheart of an old romance were made man and wife. Mrs. Glassell became Mrs. Burslem, and the delighted couple set out for St. Louis, whence they will go to New York, returning to the western coast to make their home in San Francisco. “I did not know that she had been married, and she did not know that I had.” explains Air. Burslem—Jim Burs

lem, the multi millionaire of the veldt. “1 had never forgotten her. and my own failures and disappointments had brought her memory back with renewed affection ami regret. Her story was so like mine; we met so unexpectedly, we sympathised so readily and so sincerely that there seemed to la* something fate fully happy in our reunion. 1 proposed marriage five minutes after I knew her story. She accepted me promptly, amt we were married within the hour. It was the happiest hour of my life. I was a boy again. I know that I am the lucki est man in the world. Suffering seldom works to the end that its victims shall be doubly happy. But that’s what it did tor me.”