COME TO LIFE.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume III, Issue 695, 22 July 1882, Page 2

COME TO LIFE.

Writes a Melbourne correspondent: —“ I read in a paper the other day the following paragraph, taken from a Queensland journal: ‘ Some years since, a resident of Queensland, :whose life was heavily insured, was drowned away in the interior. The corpse liquid not be recovered, but the insurance money was claimed by his disconsolate relatives. The strangest thing .about this mysterious affair is that the body of the lamented deceased was lately: seen perambulating the streets of San Francisco, looking none the worse for its -untimely end in Australia. This tttay or may not be true, for I have in my time read many stories of a similar character which were gratuitous inventions. But this is a fact: About ten years ago, a well-known Southener, who was supposed to have made a big fortune, partly out of tan-pits and partly out of mining, and whose life was insured in English and French companies, for, I believe, some LB,ooo, went home: Fourteen months afterwards came the news that he had died of enteritis at Quebec, while on his way to Australia. 1 am told that his insurance policies were paid in full ; but, anyhow, I, who have a happy faculty of remembering a face or voice for even forty years, saw my deceased friend in the flesh not a thousand miles from Salford only seven months ago. An Anglo-Australian an intimate of mine met him about two years since at Woolwich, on the occasion of the launch of an ironclad, struck up an acquaintance and dined with him the same evening at Upper Norwood, where he had a pretty little establishment, since tenanted by another distinguished Australian who got his money from the sheep’s back. My friend, who had never seen him before, received from him his portrait as a souvenir. I was confident I recognised on the back of that portrait the well-known caligraphy which had adorned many a cheque and bill passed through my hands twenty years ago, and, to make sure, I looked up the writer. He and the successful deceased were one and the same person, though he, who used to shave clean, now affects Dundrearies. He has got rid of the old partner in his joys and sorrows, and now runs in double harness with a lady who must be at least a quarter of a century his junior. I invented an excuse for visiting him, and am certain he remembered me, though there escaped on my side no sign of recognition/’