AMAZING INACTION.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2022, 6 March 1907, Page 4

AMAZING INACTION.

If it! had been said two months ago that is was possiblo for a woman to spend twenty minutes in committing suicide in a London poi. in full view of passers-by, the idea would have been scouted. But that is precisely what happened ono da\ last month in a pond on Hampstead Heath. It camo out at tho inquest that four men saw her drown and yet did not rescue her. One man said that when he first saw her she appeared to bo standing in tho water, twelve or fourteen yards from tho edge. He and another man shouted to her to come out of tho water, am sho replied, “Don’t 1 Let mo die!” Witness then wont to tho caretaker’s house for a rope or a drag, and when he returned five minutes later, tho woman was under water. Ho did not enter the water. Ho could swim only a little, and felt' quito incompetent to savo tho woman, who appeared to lie a strong swimmer. “Do you not think you might have gone fifteen or twenty yards into the water and thrown a rope to the woman?” inquired a juror. “I am not well; yor can seo I have a cold,” returned the witness. “I did not want a repetition of an experience I had when I went into the water three years ago.’ Tho second man present, who was riding, having shouted in vain to the woman to come ont, actually went to find a woman tb “coax her round.” This man was a swimmer, but declared that ho had been dissuaded from entering tho water because it was hot I A third man, who was also riding, said ho was “paralysed by tho situation.” Neither of these men rode their horses into the water as they might easily have done, though both seem to have thought of it. Finally there was an under-keeper who actually did go into tho water and throw a life-buoy and a hand-drag, where the woman had disappeared, ho but instead of going right out to ackando wentb bta ined a put;,nsss found afterwards that at the spot went back and obtained a punt, which took twenty minutes. It was where tho woman had stood the water was four feet five inches deep, and the mud three feet six inches. The jury naturally expressed their regret at this extraordinary inaction, and the Daily Express cannot be blamer for regarding the case as a slur on the reputation of the race.