SOMETHING LIKE A WOMAN.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2981, 14 January 1881, Page 4

SOMETHING LIKE A WOMAN.

Mr Fuller stepped in at the office to make arrangements for advertising a menaagerie and circus that he hopes to bring here during the season. His hat was thick wrapped with crape, and when he was asked if he suffered bereavement, he said that he was mourning for Mrs Fuller. He spoke freely of his sorrows thus :

'• I really loved that woman, although she was so very large—weighed 4001bs. They hud her on exhibition for a while at the Museum, you know. But .mere size in a woman is nothing where a man's affections are engaged. She always treated me well, too. They had a story going round in the papers that day, while > was sitting on the sofa with her, courting her, I noticed that she didn't pay much attontion, and found that there was another man on the other side showing her attentions at the same time I was. .11 untrue, sir ; nothing of the kind ever happened, but she really was large. I now when she was down at the shove last summer I took her in to bathe, and, as she got into the water, the tide suddenly rose and nearly drowned a lot of folks. It was the highest tide of the whole season. And Maud—her name was Maud—Maud couldn't swim, and she asked me to hold her while she floated ; and then, when I tried to, of course I couldn't —nobody could have held Maud without a derrick —and she went under. When she came up she was as mad as thunder, and she said she didn't believe 1 loved her. And I told her I loved her as much as ever I could at one time. A woman of those dimensions has to be adored in sections. Then she came out, and the tide went down.

" She couldn't swim, but she was one of the most beautiful dancers you ever saw. Give her a floor that has been well propped up from beneath, and she would whirl about as graceful as a fairy—that is, a fairy as large as she was. But she was a disagreeable woman to waltz with. You could't get your arm round hex waist. No man could. Four men could hardly grasp it. And so, when I used to waltz with her, I always reached as far as 1. could, and then cover the rest of the distance with a boathook. She said it tore her clothes, but she bore it like an angel, for she never cared much for dress.

" They never measured her for her clothes as they do other women. They used to get a surveyor to come and take her dimensions with a telescope, and then they would run the calico mill on full time for a couple of weeks, and turn her out a dress. Bub the gewgaws and frippery were nothing to her. fche never wore jewellery at all, excepting an engagement ring ; and when 1 ordered that, the man asked me why I wanted to put a gold hoop on my lager beer keg. She was large around the fingers. " it cost me a good deal of money, but I didn't care. All I wanted was to oblige her. There was one time, however, that i had to deny her a favour. Siie wanted me to take her down the creek on Christmas, to teach her to skate ; and I wouldn t, because I knew well enough the thing wasn't frozen solid to the bottom. Did you ever see her cab? No! Ah! a man don't often have a chance as that to observe how health stimulates the appetite. She thought nothing of putting away a barrel of oysters at lunch ; and then she'd say to me. " George, I wisli to patience you go down, and get 'em to hurry up dinner." " A hind-quarter of beef was a mere snack for her, and she'd eat a watermelon just like you'd take a pill.

" I don't exactly know what caused her death. Some people thought tbat the last two barrels of apples she ate must have disagreed with her. Any way, they gave her eight gallons of paregoric, and spread a quarter of an acre of mustard plaster on her, without doing any good. And when the old man saw she was dying he went and sat on the fence, and cried like a child ; and when they told him he oughtn't to grieve, because Maud was going to a better world, he said he knew it, but it bothered him to know whether to get her to shuffle out to the cemetery and die on the ground, or let her flicker where she was, and then bury her gradually.

" But she died at home, and they put the burial casket in the parlour on wheels, and took her through the front door on a sled, then a mule team took her along, they buried her in a place like a cellar ; and when I asked the man in the cemetery to plant violets, upon her grave, he said it would cost three pounds a month to cover the ground with these flowers, so we put in grass."

Then Mr Fuller with his handkerchief to his eyes, drifted out through the door and down Elizabeth street.