A MISSING FIVE-POUND NOTE RECOVERED.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 430, 13 January 1912, Page 7

A MISSING FIVE-POUND NOTE RECOVERED.

In the "New Quarterly Review" the sixth instalment of the Notebooks of Samuel Butler, author of "Erewhon,' contains the following very remarkable story : A friend of mine, when a young man of about five-and-twenty, one day tors the quick of his linger nail —I mean he separated the fleshy part of the finger from the nail —and this reminded him that many years previously, while quite a child, he had done the same thing. Thereupon he fell to thinking of that time, which was impressed: upon his memory partly because there was a great disturbance in the house about a missing five-pound note, and partly because it was while he had starlit fever. Following the train of thought aroused by his torn finger, he aoicd himself how he had torn it, and, after a while, it came back to him that he had been lying ill in bed as a child of seven at the house of an aunt who lived at Hertfordshire. His arms often hung out of the bed., and, as his hands wandered over the wooden frame, he felt that there was a place where a nut had come out, so that he could put his fingers in. One day, in trying to stuff a piece of paper into this hole, lie stuffed it in so far and so tightly that he tore the quick of his nail. The whole thing came back vividly, and, though he had not thought ofit for nearly twenty years, he could see the room in his aunt's house, and remembered how his aunt used to sit by his bedside writing at a little table, from which he had got the piece of paper which he had stuffed into the hole.

So far, so good. But then there flashed upon him an idea that was not so pleasant. I mean it came upon him with irresistible force that the) piece of paper he had stuffed intc the hole in the bedstead was the missing five-pound note about which there had been so much disturbance. At that time he was so young that a five-pound note was to him only a piece of paper ; when he heard that the money was missing, he had thought it was five sovereigns ; or perhaps he was too ill to think anything or to be questioned ; I forget what I was told about this —at any rate he had no idea of the value of the piece of paper he was stuffing into the hole. But now the matter had recurred to him at all he felt sure that it was the note, so he immediately went down to Hertfordshire, where his aunt was still living, and asked, to the surprise of everyone, to be allowed to wash his hands in the room he had accupied as a child. He was told that there were friends staying in the house who had the room at present, but, on his saying he had a reason and particu- v larly begging to be allowed to remain alone a little while in this room, he was taken upstairs and left there. He went to the bed, lifted up the chintz which then covered the frame and found his old friend the hole. A nut had been supplied, and he could no longer get his finger into it. He rang the belli,and, when the servdnt came, asked for a bed-key. All this time he was rapidly acquiring the reputation of being a lunatic throughout the whole house, but the key was brought, and by the help cf it he got the nut off. When he had done so, there, sure enough, by dint Df picking with his pocket-knife, he found the missing five-pound note.