A BREACH OF PROMISE CASE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3138, 19 July 1881, Page 4

A BREACH OF PROMISE CASE.

A breach of promise case of some interest has just been tried in the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice. Miss Emma Eva Partridge, daughter of a substantial Devonshire farmer, sued Mr Richard Woosnam, a commercial traveller, for Tiolating his plighted troth. There was no doubt whatever about the original promise, but apparently Mr Woosnam saw somebody he liked better, and hastened to be on with the new love with a celerity, and we may add, a faithlesness which deserved all the punishment it received. It was in the course of a happy day in Epping Forest the engaged couple managed to fall out. Mr Woosnam's ungallant account of the affair was that Miss Partridge evinced a liking for the " flowing bowl" which jarred upon his pre-matrimonial notions of what was fitting and proper. Three glasses of beer, a glass of port, one of gin and cold water, two more glasses of beer, two glasses of sherry and a bottle of stout, were all laid to the charge of the young lady in question by her former lover. Down to the second glass of sherry he had treated her, he avowed, "as one whom he loved," but that second glass proved too much for his feelings. It is comforting to find that the jury did not believe much of this story, or, at all events, law in it no sufficient reasonwhy a man should break his plighted troth ; on the contrary, they gave five hundred pounds by way of compensation for a broken heart, and added a rider to the effect that the rustic damsel left the court " without a stain on his character." Miss Partridge may therefore console herself for the loss of a very shifty suitor by the verdict of the jury.