A NEW YORK SCANDAL.

Grey River Argus, Volume XV, Issue 1820, 5 June 1874, Page 4

A NEW YORK SCANDAL.

The New York correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald writes : — " We have just had a terrible scandal in New York, which strangers would do well to heed. Some few mouths a«o a planter from Bermudas arrived hero one hot August morning, at 10 o clock, with five hundred dollars in gold in his pocket. He was a man of considerable social importance, and was amongst other things grand master of Bermuda masons. At 2 o'clock of the same day the police found him in the street, as they say, delirious with drinking, though more probably, as he had been sober all the way from Nassau, he was simply suffering from sunstroke. They took him to Bellevue Hospital, and then transferred him in a few hours, as he only had four dollars in his pocket, to the charity hospital on Hart's Island, where he died the next day. No effort was apparently made to discover his friends, if he had any, and no notice was given to the masons. He was simply thrown into a rude coffin and buried as quickly as possible in a trench with six hundred odd other bodies. This was the more shameful, as the man had given his right name and address* and could have been easily identified by the people of the steamship on which he was a passenger. A little while ago, his friends discovered his fate, but were informed that they could not get his body for decent burial as it would be dangerous to public health to exhume it. Then the masons interfered and our city fathers are making an investigation, which shows already that this poor Mr French was lucky in escaping so well as he did, and that the wonder was he not sold to the doctors as a subject. Indeed, is it not certain yet that he was not, as several other coffins, exhumed under similar circumstances, have been found to contain only stones and earth, and no body. Of course, we are now horrified to find that such things are done in a Christian city, and the end of it will be that paupers will have a tolerably decent funeral, and some fortunate political undertakers get rich by burial contracts. I just mention this in passing to warn Australians to be careful on their arrival in this city to keep out of drinking shops, and not get sunstroke, and above all not to die here. It is one of the worst places, apparently, for a dead stranger, in the civilised world."