People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 24 October 1912, Page 41

People We Hear About

The Holy Father has conferred the Order of the Holy Sepulchre upon Sir Thomas H. G. Grattan Es-' monde,jßart.; M.P. for North Wexford. For a number of years Sir Thomas has been one iof l the Pope's ' chamberlains. ; Dr. John P. Corrigan, of Pawtucket*, Rhode Island, U.S.A., after thirty years in the practice of medicine, and specially noted for his work on .diseases of the eye, : 'ear, nose, and throat] has given up his profession for the ; purpose, long since formed, of entering the Dominican novitiate at Somerset, Ohio. His Eminence Cardinal Van Rossum, the Papal Legate to the Eucharistic Congress, is only fifty-eight —comparatively young for a Cardinal—and is a mem- - ber of the Redernptorist Congregation. For some time he taught at Ruremonde, and later was rector of the Novitiate House at Witten. In' 1895 he was transferred to Rome, where he filled the post of a Consultor of \ the Holy Office,' besides being elected ConsultorGeneral of his congregation. ' Of the priests selected for the Putumayo mission, two of the Franciscan Fathers—viz., Father Furlong and Father Felix Ryan, are natives of Ireland. Father Furlong, who is a Wexford man, has had considerable experience in mission work in Oriental countries, and is well used and inured to the : hardships' of forest life in the ' deadly climate of the Eastern Archipelago, while Father .. Felix Ryan, who is a Kilrush man, hab also had varied H and considerable experience in Eastern climates. ;|| ; The death of the Hon. Mrs. Scott-Murray, at the age of eighty-seven (says the Tablet),. carries the mind back to the early days of the Victorian Conversions; ; for Amelia Charlotte Eraser, eldest daughter of the twelfth Lord Lovat, married, as long ago as 1846, the late Charles Robert Scott-Murray, of Danesfield, who was already a Catholic two years old. Somebody called him ' the umbrella convert,' the name having its origin in the. incident that he left his umbrella in a Catholic, church abroad, and, going back to reclaim it, went into "' the sacristy, where he got into talk with a priest, by ; , whom he was finally instructed. He sat in Parliament for Buckinghamshire for some time; and he served as ( : high _ sheriff of his county in the 'fifties. On that occasion he drove in state to receive the justices, accompanied by his Catholic chaplain, a procedure which was the occasion of a local storm in a tea-potthe sort of tea-pot which time has .finally cracked and-' placed on a shelf with other curiosities. '■..'-'... . ; ' The foundations of many of the most colossal fortunes in the United States have been 1 : laid by lucky emigrants from Europe. The father of James Gordon Bennett, the Croesus of newspaper-proprietors, ran away from his Scottish school to seek fortune across the< Atlantic, and spent many a foodless- day in quest of work before he found a poorly-paid post as proof- ' reader. The founder of the Astor millions- was that John Jacob, butcher's son, who left his fatherland to ■■" take a steerage-passage to New York with £5 in his :: pocket for capital, and to begin his chase of ' rainbow gold' by beating furs at a dollar a day. Mr. Carnegie first set his face towards his many millions when his parents parted with their old home and household goods to pay the family passage to America, and the man who could now write a cheque for ten millions and - scarcely miss them still flushes with pride as he recalls the day on which he drew his first weekly wages of 5s as a bobbin-boy in an Allegheny city factory. ,' I can- > not tell you how proud I was,' he says, ' when I re- j: ceived my first week's earnings, no longer entirely' : dependent on my parents, but at last admitted to the -I family partnership/ -'- , v ' '%