MARRIAGES EXTRAORDINARY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3769, 6 August 1907, Page 3

MARRIAGES EXTRAORDINARY.

Love has been laughing at the locksmiths again, and a man sentenced for the rest of his natural life to penal servitude in a German prison has just married hisgaoler’s daughter. A somewhat similar thing recently happened in an English prison, though the term to which the bridegroom was sentenced was a shorter one. He was a man bearing an honoured name which he had humbled in the dust. While he yet prospered he proposed to the woman he loved. She refused him. Perhaps the sequel was a matter of cause and effect. Anyhow he fell, and the vicar of a West End church, when visiting a famous penal settlement, found him there. Who acted as intermediary we are not told, but the broken man received one morning a note saying, ‘‘You once asked me to marry you. I said ‘ No.’ Perhaps if you asked me ' again the result might be different.” From his prison cell, he made the second proposal, and was accepted, and the clergyman who had found him in gaol married him to the noble hearted woman who had come as an angel to him in his sorrow. A different story comes from a French penal settlement, where a male convict and a female convict desired to marry. Such marriages are not uncommon and the governor offered no objection. He asked only that he should be supplied with proof that the man was single. A priest volunteered to get the proofs. 1 ‘ Were you not married in France ?” he asked. “ I was,” the man answered. “And your wife is dead ?” “ She is. ” “ Have you any documentary evidence to show that she is dead ? “I have not.” “That being so,” said the priest, “I am afraid that I must decline to marry you.” There was an awkward pause, and the man looked with embarrasment at his prospective bride, “I could prove that my former wife is dead,” he said slowly, at last. “ How can you prove it ?” he was asked. And he answered, “ I was sent here for killing her.” The marriage followed.