NEWS BY MAIL.

Hokitika Guardian, 30 May 1921, Page 4

NEWS BY MAIL.

MILLIONAIRE’S NIECE. NEW ‘YORK, March 18

Clara Smith was yesterday acquitted of the oharge of wilful murder of hexuncle, Jake Hamon, the millionaire oil Magnate of Oklahoma, whom she shot at an hotel several months ago.

Her story has since been followed with eager interest by the entire country. The defence was that the girl was protecting herself against a brutal attack by her uncle, with whom she had lived, as she alleged, in a state of abject terror for years past, since he took her from school and forced her to become his mistress. Her statement that Hamon was drunk at the time of the shooting was accepted by the jury, who found a verdict in her favour after forty minutes’ absence. In December the girl said she killed Hamon when he announced his intention of leaving her to go hack to his wife. Mrs Hamon is a cousin of the President’s wife, and Hamon realised the value of this relationship to his own political future. But Mr Harding is well known as a “home” domestic man to whom such a scandal would be distasteful, and the girl was therefore sacrificed. A diary was found after the girl’s flight to Texas. • In it she warned “any other girl or woman who may' be ready to embark on the sea of companionship with a man.” “Know your man,” she wrote, “know the side that comes to life only in the presence of four walls. Know him at his worst before you sell your souT and become ever afterward his slave.”

WOMAN’S LOTTERY FORTUNE. PARIS, March 20 Sudden wealth won in a lottery has brought sorrow for Mme. Hofer, a woman employed as a servant in a bar, who in 1905 drew the winning ticket, worth £40,000, in the French Press Lottery. She became for a time a character of national note, bought a house and a carriage, employed 10 servants, and lent money right and left to friends and other applicants. In 6 months she had only £B,OOO of her fortune. This she has lost in speculation, in connection with which she brought an action against her lawyer.

BIG HAUL OF SEALS. MONTREAL, March 20 A wireless message to-night reports that the sealing schooner Viking off St Johns (Newfoundland) overtook the largest herd of seals ever seen in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Four thousand were killed in fcluee hours, and the slaughter only stopped when the vessel became jammed in pack

The herd still remained visible 34 miles south of Magdalen Islands, and still so large that the slaughter did not seem to worry it. The young seals, which yield the softest skins and the finest oil, are in prime killing condition about the middle of March. They are killed on the ice with iron-shod clubs, being quite helpless and unable as yet to swim. The f a t —is separated from the carcase, “pelt”—the skin and adhering mass of which is rejected as valueless.

EAGLE AND A BABY. LONDON, March 20. A partial solution of a 1914 mystery has been yielded by the discovery of the charred skeleton of a child’s body on the highest mountain in the Bennaehit* group (Al>erdeenshire), known as the Mither Tap. A child of two disappeared while at play and a search in a radius of 30 miles proved futile, the belief being that the child had been carried awav by gipsies or else by an eagle. Yesterday the hotly, believed to he that of the missing child, was found two miles from the cottage from which the disappearance took place by a man salving«tiinber on the mountain, which was swept by fire last year. It is believed‘that the baby was carried away by an eagle, because it was too young to have wandered two miles ti])'a steep hillside deeply covered with undergrowth.

TOO OLD FOR MARRIAGE. PARTS, March 20

“She insisted on my marrying her, and I thought she was too old at 37, so I killed her,” was the calm confession made by a 19-vears-old florist’s assistant named Lionel Fiorutti, charged with murdering a woman at Nice. The body was thrown down a well and was .at first wrongly identified. Only yesterday was definite proof forthcoming that the battered remains were those of a woman with whom Fiorutti was known to have been living. When arrested lie at once confessed.