Odd Reasons for Choosing Wives.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXIII, Issue XVII, 22 October 1904, Page 64

Odd Reasons for Choosing Wives.

An art student from North Dakota, living in the Im tin quarter of Paris, in the house of an amiable but impoverished woman, fell in arrears for his rent for more than eleven years. Taken vigorously to task by his landlady, he told her frankly that there was absolutely no prospect of payment, whereupon she as promptly declared that he must either pay at once or get out. Confronted with two such awful alternatives, the former impossible and the latter most disagreeable, he discarded them both and in a second of inspiration proposed matrimony, lie was accepted, proved to be a good provider, and made his wife happy. A Air Plumb of Huntington, Conn., having an unusually fat daughter 'whom he was anxious to see well married, was much grieved to learn that the young men of her acquaintance all showed a preference for lean sweethearts. lie published an oiler of live dollars for every pound the girl might weigh on the day of her wedding, the money to go to the young man who married her. An attempt was made to conceal the true avoirdupois of Miss Plumb, and strangers who read the advertisement imagined that she was a midget. A Mr llarang, who made inquiries, finding that she weighed 400 pounds, promptly proposed, was accepted. and soon after came into possession

of both the substantial maiden and her dowry. A London philatelist, envying some curious specimens in the album of an elderly feminine acquaintance, ottered a dozen times to buy or exchange for the coveted treasures. L’nable to secure the prizes in such ways he finally proposed matrimony, and so came into possession of the lady and her stamps. John Henry Maedler, the astronomer, whose favourite study was the n».?on, having learned that Frau Witte, the wife of the state councillor, owned a (wonderful model of his pet luminary, spent years trying to gain possession of it. As her husband was living he could not marry the owner of the model, so he married her daughter, and at the death of his mother-in-law the coveted moon became his. A Yorkshireman whose poor relations pestered him continually married the worst scold in the county to have a guardian who would protect him /rom the importunate legacy hunters. The venomous and incessant vituperation of the woman had the desired effect. The late Augustus Hare tells of a one-legged 'woman who became the third wife of a prosperous widower. One day while searching the closets she came upon two cork legs, each labelled with the name of a different woman. In fear and rage she went among the relatives of her husband asking questions. But they pacified her by saying that both his first and second wives had also been obliged to wear an artificial linrb, and that the husband’s married life in each case had been so happy that be had sworn never to marry any but a one-legged- woman.