THE 'TIMES' HOAXED.

Lyttelton Times, Volume X, Issue 617, 6 October 1858, Page 3

THE 'TIMES' HOAXED.

1 ; •'' 'Every man is said to Have his soft side, and-we; supposes that even journalists are not exempted fromithe common Iot;of humanity. Toe 'Times ' is jnot a very easy paper to hoax . iWS S?;? stlon whether an indelicacy, in. Greek would be swallowed in Printing-house square as easily^as: by Us .Fleet-street neighbour ; vet even' the "TirnW' lias its soft side. That side is the one turned towards America. Astute, sagacious,; and accurate as it may be upon all other mundane matters, directly it touches anything of transatlantic origin, lo ! all. its prudence, all its-sagacitrfvand'all its logical faculty* seems to have deserted it. Everybody remembers the Arrowsmith hoax, and how long it was before the 'Times' could be convinced that "murders and duels were not the common amusements of railway travellers in the most civilized parts of the Union. Here is , another curious story, which the 'Times..' confesses, to. have taken "from an American paper," and which it puts forward as illustrating in a remarkable manner the mutual misunderstanding which is possible between two races influenced by entirely antagonistic motives of action." Now, to anyone at all accustomed to the examination of compositions for. the : purpose of determining their origin by internal evidence, there never : was a plainer specimen of iuvented fiction than this story, which is introduced with so much .pomposity.. The narrator of the -story professes to have heard it from a Frenchman, with wlioin he fell into a conversation on the subject of smokiug tobacco. The Frenchman was an artist, and was employed to paint the portraits of a family named Jackson living at Agra. The family of the Jacksons. is described with dramatic minuteness: there is the proud father of the stock, comedies-with little depth and much narrowness of mind ; there is the ladymother, whose conversation consisted of a lament over inferiority of meat in India, and a wonder that Hindoos did not leave off worshiping idols when they were told it was wrong; there was th.i son, a handsome young man with very red whiskers, and a great though silent esteem | of himself; finally, there was a married daughter, a Mrs. Lester, the wife of a judge in Calcutta; who had twin children, in whom the pride of the family was centered. Among the household of this family was a Hindoo girl, one Zelle, the heroine of the story. We cannot, pursue the details through which, with much ingenity, the plot is evolved ; suffice it to say that the- Frenchman finds Zelle hiding a cobra de capella in a bed, and that she confesses to him. that she is the daughter of a Brahmin, and, having vowed deadly vengeance to the Feringhee, her purpose was to; kill the twin sisters, because their father had pronounced a judgment which had deprived her father of his : inheritance. The Frenchman, after hearing her story, lets her go, and she escapes. The concluding sentence of the story deserves to be quoted : —" I saw Zelle dancing as a nautchgirl, at one of the festivals of .Delhi. I heard

in the following summer that the twins had died from the bite of a serpent, received in the gardens of their father's country house near ■Calcutta ; and since then. I never went to bed in India without looking narrowly under the bolster." And this story; which would be well enough in ' Reynold's- Miscellany,' or any similar publication, is paraded through nearly■ two columns of the" leading journal "as illustrating Indian affairs" iua remarkable manner." The best of the joke».however, remains to be

told. The story " from an American paper "is from Mr. Dickens' Household Words, whence it was copied by .the American journal, only to be re-copied by the ' Times,' and the whole ,aihur is illustrative, not so much of "Indian attains,' as of the astonishing ignorance which the leading journal can display, not only of these affairs, but of English 'and American literature.