AN OUTWITTED FATHER.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3495, 19 September 1882, Page 4

AN OUTWITTED FATHER.

An Atncricnn paper says : —Tho talk of the town is an elopement that proved to be a ' Comedy of Errors." A rich old creole opposed the marriage of his only daughter with a poor artist. One evening there was a carriage drawn cautiously up to the corner of the grand boulevard Esplanada. There was an air of mystery in its movements. The driver looked around, and then, apparently from some signal, fixed his eyes at the window of a mansion a vei*y little distance from his halting-place. A female form, cloaked and veiled, threw open the casement, at the same time bidding the driver to advance. He did so, and when the carriage stood immediately at the door, beneath the lighted window, a tall and handsome man jumped out of the vehicle and entered the house. Shortly after two cloaked figures passed hurriedly down the steps of the principal entrance and hastily entered the carriage, closed the door, and requested the driver to ' speed like lightning.' An ©Id gentleman, the proprietor of the mansion and the father of the artist's inamorata, was a spectator of the whole affair, and, gliding softly from a private door, mounted the rumble of the carriage and found himself whirled on the road to Milneburg, the lake port of the Mobile packet. The old fellow had caught them. The lovers wei'e in the carriage, but he was on the box. On rattled the carriage to the steamboat-landing. Down jumped the father and opened the door. What did he see ? Could it be! Yes, it was his own hostler and his daughter's maid! The affrighted servants descended from the carriage, and in agony which was so exquisitely comic that the disappointed paterfamilias could not refrain from smiling, fell on their knees and begged forgiveness. The prevailing mania for elopement had seized them. Seeing a carriage before the door, and being under orders from the millionaire to watch the artist's movements, they thought to thwart the elopement of their mistress by using the artist's carriage for their own. Meanwhile the artist and the lady were being married at the house of a friend.