AN EXTRAORDINAY CASE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume XI, Issue 1336, 31 July 1883, Page 4

AN EXTRAORDINAY CASE.

The latest case of Enoch Ardenism has turned up at Cleveland. Eight years ago, as the Herald tell us, Geo. Eastwood, a young and handsome artist, with some means and a good deal of talent, settled in that city from New York. One evening he mqf at a birthday reception the young lady who subsequently became his wife, to the regret and disappointment of one who also loved her, but never could find heart to tell her the story of his love. A year or two of happiness followed the marriage, and then the young artist determined to go to Italy, and study his profession with a celebrated Florentine painter. Leaving his wife behind, he set out for the Old World. Arriving in Italy, he resolved to take a month’s recreation in the mountains. Venturing out without a guide he one day received a fearfull fall down the mountain side. Brain fever followed. For weeks and weeks he tossed upon a bed of agony, onlytogrow worse and worse, and finally to apparently lose reason and mind altogether. He was confined in an asylum a hundred miles from Florence where no effort was made to identify him. His trunk and letters were at Florence, and when the letters of enquiry from home reached the police of that city this fact was sent back with the information that their owner could not be found. What money the artist possessed he took with him, leaving only enough behind to provide for the wants of the family until he should return. A year had already passed, and the money had long since gone. Too proud to ask assistance of her friends the heart-broken wife took to her needle, and between -her prayers for her husband's return and her tears over the cruel fate that kept forcing itself upon her, she managed to earn enough to live. Tome rolled on, and two, three and four years were added to her widowhood. Then the old lover, the Phillip Bay of the story, alike in pity and in love, offered her his heart and hand. Believing her husband to be doad, Mrs Eastwood accepted him, and they wore married. A few weeks since, Eastwood, having recovered his mind, started to return to the home he had loft six years ago. He found it deserted. A neighbor told him the story of his wife’s long vigils and anxious waiting for his coming, and her subsequent marriage to another. Madly, wildly, almost desperately, he rushed away, and an hour later, when the evening shadows were settling over the home of his former wife, a pale, attenuated face peered in the curtainless window and read the truth of the story that had been told. But the newly-wedded wife never knew the awful fact, and the heart-broken and depressed man quietly left the city. A day or two ago, in an obscure corner of a little Western journal, was recorded the suicide of George Eastwood, a former Clevelander.