A SINGULAR HISTORY.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 242, 27 January 1875, Page 2

A SINGULAR HISTORY.

A young person, not more than thirtytwo years of age, appeared at the Auckland Police Station with five fine healthy orphan children, for although not utterly fatherless, they are left, through the imprudence of their mother, without paternal care and supervision. The story of this woman, so young in years, is as striking and remarkable as the heroine of a romance. She came, some twelve years ago, from one of the towns of the midland counties of England, we believe from Coventry, famous for its -watches, and memories of Peeping Tom and the Lady Godiva, immortalised by Tennyson. Soon after her advent in this colony, she was in service, and noted for her extreme modesty of bearing which apparently has not yet deserted her; but beneath that seeming modesty, there was a look which was not deemed honest. She had admirers, but was rather flirty, and jilted several of them. At length she consented to marry, and actually went to church and tied the knot, but not that of a true woman. She cared little for the man she had married, but he loved her with an intensity of passion rarely surpassed, One evening, on returning to his nest at the Thames, the bird had flown, and he was left in an empty house. He soon learned that she had left the locality with a new lover, but their whereabouts could not be discovered. At length she left her second lover with four children, and was next heard of in Auckland at a questionable house in Wako field-street, where the landlady seized her sewing machine for debt. She quitted the house for a walk in Queen-street, and there, like Virginia, she met Paul. A conversation ensued between them ; she informed him that she was a single girl, working a sewing machine, and earned an honest living. Upon being further questioned she replied that she was

lonely and had no objection to a protector in the form of a husband. The match was made in less than an hour. Virginia was so lonely, and Paul was so touched by the, recital of Virginia’s misfortunes, that he offered to take her to the Registrar’s office the next morning. He met her at the foot of Wakeficld-strcet, and in the presence of two witnesses, Virginia took to her heart her second busband, and her sixteenth lover. They took a small house and for six days seemed floating on the placid, sunny stream of conjugal happiness, when 10, the father of her four children discovered the fair fugitive’s retreat, and with the fury of outraged feelings, swore he would have revenge. Like Othello. Poor Paul leaped out of the window and fled, and Virginia fell heavily on the floor beneath the iron fist of the angry man, and then the strong man wept like a child. He was locked that night, and the next day orderci? to find sureties for his good conduct. Paul fled, it was supposed, either to the bush or destruction; his body has not since been discovered. The wretched woman, who forsook the guide of her youth, has since led a sad and melancholy life, and this New Year’s morning she appeared with the four children, and a fifth in the person of little Paul, a perfect wreck of womanhood, draped in faded finery, and draggled in wet, up to her knees. She could not support her children, she said ; and so she had brought them to the Court for the industrious and better disposed of the community to support in the Heine for neglected and criminal children. — Auckland Star.