FROM THE PARIS PRESS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9066, 5 February 1908, Page 7

FROM THE PARIS PRESS.

“Husband was suspicious. He had put spies upon uu." Knowing we were undone, I confessed all. He guesses that I lent you money. He insists that you shall sign ten monthly notes of hand for 50f. each, and says if you do not he will be revenged. So I shall come to you Friday morning at eight.” A youthful bank clerk was exceedingly surprised on receiving this letter from his more ingenious than candid landlady, as he had never dreamt of departing towards her from that deference due by young lodgers to landladies of uncertain age. Not having replied, he received a second letter. “I implore you to sign the notes. You have broken up my home and destroyed my future peace.” Nothing ever Jhaving been further from the young bank clerk’s thoughts than to break up his landlady’s home, he put the matter in the hands of the police. At the ensuing trial for blackmail the landlady confessed the plot, urging that she had been put up to it by her husband, while the latter pleaded good faith and threw the guilt upon the wife. Anyhow, the bank clerk was cleared of all suspicion of former designs on his landlady. The latter, with the benefit of the First Offenders’ Act, and her husband without, each got four months. “Your ticket won big lottery prize,” a bank clerk wired to a friend in the country, who took the next train up to town. Money being henceforth no object, the two.did themselves well at the winner’s ex« pense. Dinners, theatres, supper parties, and motor cars killed time pleasantly for several days. By then the friend from the country had spent all his cash in hand, and it was time to claim the prize. He asked the bank clerk, being in the business, to carry out the required formalities for him. But the bank clerk looked uncomfortable, and put the matter off. At last he confessed to having made a trilling mistake. The friend’s ticket had missed winning the £20,000 prize by one number, which was as good "as a mile. __ The country cousin has gone back to the country. M. Habib, a Paris diamond merchant, has had a stroke of luck, which makes up for past ill-luck. Two years and a half ago he was robbed by a trick in broad daylight of a necklace and seven ; long chains of diamonds worth in all £36,000. From then till a few days ago the jewels had never been traced. But at the beginning of this week he was informed by a Viennese merchant that the missing diamonds had been offered him for sale, and that, suspecting a theft, he had had_ them seized. M. Habib went to "Vienna, recognised his jewels, and has got them back. The unknown thieves had made clumsy attempts at disguising some of the pieces, but otherwise the gems were intact. The Viennese merchant gets £BOO reward from M. Habib.