A STRANGE CASE.

Evening Star, Issue 4122, 13 May 1876, Page 3

A STRANGE CASE.

A singular maintenance case has bejen ..heard at the Warrnambool Police CouSrt, Victoria. The 'Examiner' reports tflat Isaoella Taylor, the cpmplainant, a respejbt able-looking girl, aged about eighteen, resided with, her parents in tka Allaasford

district, and Charles A. Cowley, the defendant, was a selector at Curdie River. The complainant swore that she first knew the defendant about eighteen months or two rears ago. He first came to her parents' house on the sth April, 1875, and her to marry him. She refused to hare him, and he came again on the 27th April. She was then in the second room of the house, making a wedding dress, as she was a dressmaker. After talking to her father and mother a little while he came into her room, and again asked her to marry him, and went on his knees before her, but she declined the alliance. He then waved a white pocket-handerchief before her face, with some drug or strange smell on it. She began to feel faint, and then he took hold of her, and said : "Why, Bella, you are getting sleepy." She immediately became insensible, and remembered nothing more. She believed that, having rendered her insensible, he seduced her. Cowley denied that he was the father of the child, or that he had ever rendered the plaintiff insensible by means of a drugged handkerchief. He admitted that he was at her house on the 27th April, and did not leave until one o'clock in the morning. He had married another woman after the alleged seduction. The police magistrate said the case was no doubt a most extraordinary one, and probably unprecedented, for the complainant swore that she was seduced at once by the aid of drugs, and she not being & consenting party. If the Bench made an ordef fpr maintenance, the defendant would then be assured to have been guilty of perjury. Th« evidence was so distinctly at variance that tho case must be dismissed.