Advertising for a Wife

Feilding Star, Volume VIII, Issue 42, 18 September 1886, Page 3

Advertising for a Wife

AN ACTION FOE DIVOKCE. At the Divorce Court, Sydney, a •uit for dissolution of marriage was heard recently before Mr Justice Windeyer, which tested the wisdom of matrimonial negotiations through the newspapers. The hero of this narrate — or rather the victim— was a labourer named William Farrell, aged 43, and the petitioner in the sui<, the respondent, Maud Mabel, agea 30, used to be a washerwoman, but forsook her calling when the petitioner married her, on May 13, 1884. It appeared that Farrell, who is a widower with two children, wanted to re-marry, but unable to find a suitable lady from among the circle of his fair acquaintances, he advertised for a " partner." The advertisement was promptly answered by Maud Mabel and other aspiring ladies, but Farrell's discrimination declared in favour of the laundress. She referred him to a female frieud on the subject of her antecedents. To that "friend" Farrell rent, and although she was known to him as little as was the candidate for Lift hand, the unsuspecting fellow listened to and believed a favourable account of the respondent. They were married by the Itov George Preston, Congregational miuister. The rest of the story may be very briefly told. They lived together for a week after the ceremony. But not happily. Mrs Farrell got on the apree every night, and, indeed, on the very evening of the wedding she was, according to the husband, "more than threeparts gone." The petitioner remonstrated, but in vain. After a week she left the house, and did not return home all night; next morning howover, she threw " over the garden wall" a note to say that if the petitioner would allow her to remove some articles of furniture she had left behind, she would agree to a separation and trouble him no more. The petitioner agreed that she should do this, "but on the condition that she signed a deed of separation drawn up by her- | self, and returned to him her wedding ring. The respondent called the same day with a vanman, signed the deed and took away her property. The ring she could not restore to the petitioner, having pawned it. Any- j how she handed him the ticket, and the petitioner afterwards redeemed and sold the sacred emblem. Some time after he found his wife living in a house in Little Barcour-street, Darlinghurst, with a labourer, as his wife. There was no defence, and the Court found for the petitioner on all tho issues. A decree nisi was pronounced.