AN OLD LADY’S EXPERIENCE

Gisborne Times, Volume XIX, Issue 1528, 9 August 1905, Page 3

AN OLD LADY’S EXPERIENCE

, A SORRY TALE. .(Per-R.M.S. Sierra at ’Auckland.) Son Francisco, July 20. Margarot Northington, aged 75, friendless, in poverty, and shorn of all her memories of happier times, must start again on her travels np and down tho seas. For ayear she has had no country, and her appeals to both the Amorioan and English flags have met with oold rebuffs. Within a few days she will leave the Old Ladies’

Home, where she has been kindly oared for, and start once more oh a voyage which will end only where some skipper pulls out , his prayer book, and the quartermaster I tips her withered body s.vathed in canvas into the ocean —so long her only home. The immigration authorities here have denied her last appeal. The United States I district judge, Ds Haven, some time ago I decided that no aot of habeas oorpus lay, and for some weeks she bad been in the I custody of charity. Mrs Northington, j i widow of a British army officer, first I , camo to the attention of the immigra- I tion officials when she arrived at this I port in February of that year from British Columbia, She was denied a landing there, and sent back to British territory. There she was also denied a landing, and for several weeks she was a traveller up and down tho coast on the stsamers of the Pacific Coast Steamship Company. Then friends of the moment took pity on her, I and an attorney took tho matter up before the Courts and the Immigration Bureau, all without avail. Now Mrs Northington j will be put on a steamer for Now Zealand, whencs she is said to have come on a sail- 1 ing vessel two years ago. Her lauding there will be forbidden, as it was in British Columbia, and her sole hope is the faint 1 one that someoDo is willing to go her bond J to support her for the rest of her life. The ■ old woman is now in her dotage. Her feeble mind recalls but few happenings later than the death of her husband, a

relative of the titled NorthiDgtons, of England. To tho best of her memory, he died in India, leaving her with a daughter, who married Rnd came to this country. When the darkness of age and debility came over her, she turned fondly to this one member

left of her family. She arrived in San Francisoo, aDd in her Bearch traced her daughter, or a woman she thought was her daughter, to Dawson City; but in the meantime her littis fund of money dwindled away. She, who had onoe lived with the best, slept on a police station floor, and was finally helped to this oity. Again her feeble condition and shattered mind brought her under the provinces of the statute relating to immigrants liable to become a public charge. She was sent back to Victoria (British Colombia), was refused a landing, and since then nntil her reception in the Old Ladies’ Home has been an unwilling passenger between the two countries. By orders from Washington she will now be sent to Auckland, New Zealand. If she is returned from that port, as there is little donbt in view of the statement of the British Ambassador at Washington, she will hereafter find no foothold on solid ground. Her life will bo passed in the steerage of a liner, a greasy steward her only nurse, her sola companions those of the voyage—homeless, unfriended, alone, with the few memories left her by the cruel hand of time.