MADAME RACHEL.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 2991, 26 January 1881, Page 4

MADAME RACHEL.

Situated in the wild west of Ireland and not far from Ballinasloe, the town of Aughrim would, even in the present day, be hardly the spot which a doctor would select as a likely place in which to establish a flourishing practice. Yet more than half a century ago, when the locality was even more desolate than now a certain Dr. Fiiller arrived with this idea, bringing him his wife and a letter of introduction from the resident magistrate at Athlono. But either through the sparseness of the population, or its poverty, the salubrity of the spot, or -want of skill on the adventurous doctor's part, he found it very hard to keep the wolf from the door. In this emergency he turned his attention to the distillation of cosmetics and manufacture of concoctions supposed to preserve and improve the delicacy of the female complexion. He was assisted in his search for those herbs from whose leaves and petals could be extracted the essence of perpotual beauty, by his servant girl, Rachael Booker, a red-legged wench of some fourteen summers. Rachel was a native of the village, but, judging from her name, and the peculiar type of her features, it is more than probable that her parents were not indigenous to the soil, but were gipsies of a Semitic caste, who, in the course of their- ;nomad career, had found something so attractive in Aughrim as to chain them to the spot. Rachel had picked up a little learning, before entering service, at a sort of dame's school, supported by the landlord whose tenants her parents were. Early in life she seems, with reference to frequent disappearance of cord wood from park to park, to have displayed that hazy notion of meum and tuum, which, if undiscovered, goes far to ensuTe success in life. But even a talent for preserving and beautifying complexions, will not keep a family when there is not a sufficiently-extended field for the talent to be exercised on. So, finally, Dr Fuller was forced to take his departure, and seek for pastures new, where his genius would meet with, more pecuniary responses. Having left the Galway ladies " beautiful for ever," he emigrated to Manchester, taking his belongings and household with him. Here Rachel Booker won the heart and hand of an assistant in a chemist's shop. Lost sight of for years, she turned up again in the well-known person of Madame Rachel. Such is the story of this notorious woman. The history of her trial and her subsequent imprisonment are too fresh in the world's mind to need recapitulation. Last week she died, almost without notice, in Woking prison.—Exchange.