ROMANCES OF UNEXPECTED FORTUNES

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LI, Issue 207, 22 August 1908, Page 4

ROMANCES OF UNEXPECTED FORTUNES

HOW GEORGE HARLAND BECAME' A MILLIONAIRE. "Fire!" The cry rang out with startling suddenness in the silent streets of Now York at an early hour of a Mar.h morniug in 18U1, as Ueorge Harland w.is hurling home to his luUgings from his work as compositor in the Tribune office. It was the hour between dark and dawn, when the streets were deserted sav-J for a few homeward stragglers returning, like George liarland, from their night's work, and the few who wort starting for a new day's labour while the great city was still wrapped in slumbers. But at the magic of the terrible word, '■' Fire!" the silent streets seemed to wake into life. Windows were thrown open, at which startled faces appeared; half-dressed figures emerged from hundreds of doorways; the word passed from lip to lip in increasing volume, until the streets far and near were full of shouts of "Fire!" and the soun 1 of hurrying feet. There was no need to ask in what direction the lire lay. The sky to t.ie north was already a flaming, palpitating red, against which clouds of dense smoke rose and rolled, lit up by niyria-is of flying sparks; and, as he raced wilh the crowd, Harland could already hea: the roar of the destroying flames and ■the distant shouts of the excited oillookers.

There was tragedy in the air, and, as he ran breathlessly, as if his own life depended on the fleetness of his feet, a mighty fear, amounting almost to a conviction, smote the young compositor. What if the flames were destroying the hotel in whieh the girl, Elsie Vanner, who had promised to i.e his wife in the coming June, and of whom he had been thinking when that horrible cry broke into his delightful reverie, earned her modest livelihooui The torturing fear lent wings to his feet, which seemed shod with lead, so slowly, to his disordered fancy, they seemed to move. As the roar of the flames grew nearer and nearer, and he already felt their hot breath on hi< face, his fears grew to an appalled certainty, for his steps.were taking him, straight as an arrow, to the hotel which sheltered all he held dearest in life; and in a few moments more the sight he most dreaded to see burst into view. Breathless, exhausted, with his heart I beating like the throbs of a mighty ! em'ine, he found himself on the fringe * of a dense, excited, awe-struck crow;', ' beyond which towered a huge building ' literally sheeted in fire—flames whim \ roared and leapt in a very fury of deF struction, through and round the hotel 5 in which was Elsie. 'I Perhaps she was saved already, was I I the thought that for a brief moment " I thrilled him with a revulsion of joy.

"Are they all out?" he excitedly asked those who stood nearest, impotent on lookers, at the tragedy. "All except those at that window," was the answei; and, looking in the direction indicated, he saw a huddled, terrified group ot women gathered at a fourth-floor win-, dow. A glance, distant as it was, told him that one of the white, terror-

stricken faces at the window was t.ie face he loved most on earth. She was doomed, he could see, to a horrible death before his eyes. But if .she were to die he would at least perish with net. With a cry of "Save the women! which, rang high above the roar of the flames, be plunged into the dense mass of humanity which blocked the way to Elsie He seemed in that supreme Moment/ to possess the strength pf a dozen men, for the closely-packed mass divided before his onward rush, until

he found himself at its inner verge, with a clear space between him and the darting tongues which scorched his fad'. There was nothing now but the flames between him and Elsie. As he dashed forward from the crowd scores of hands tried to seize him and hurl him back; but he shook them oil as if they wen. so many llies, and with cries of " Madman!" "Stop him!" ringing in his cars, he plunged into the blazing buildiii,;, covering, as he went, his head with his coat as a protection, however poor, against the flames and the suffocating smoke. His clothes were now aflame, the fire seemed to be running through his very veins, when faint calls for help came

to his ears. They grew nearer and nearer as he struggled onward. Flinging open the door of a room from whieh they seemed to proceed, he found -,o his delight that-he had reached his goal at last. The room was black wilh smoke, but through it he could ee white-robed figures. "'Elsie! Elsie!" he cried; "I've conic to save you!" and in a moment, with a cry of joy, the girl was in his arms. Snatching her from the window hemade for the stairs. Down, down !■'' plunged; he saw nothing, felt nothing, until there came a rush of cooler ai,', and with a last desperate effort he bore his burden out of the Gehenna )1 fire into the open. While a hundred

helpers ran forward to his assistance, and with the thunderous cheers from ten thousand lungs in his ears, he gently laid his burden on the ground and removed the coat to gaze on the face c' the dear one he had thus, as by a miracle, restored to life. A moment ot horrified stillness followed; then an agonised cry rang out as he fell insensible by her side. The girl he had risked his life to save was not Elsie; it was another, whose face he had never seen before! Such was the dramatic opening of one of the most remarkable human

dramas in whieh Love and Fortune ever played the leading roles, the curtain on the concluding scene of which was rung down a lew years ago under conditions as dramatic as its opening. For weeks Harland lay in hospital hovering between life and death—in fact, so serious were his injuries, the price he paid for his fruitless heroism, that his recovery was one of the medical marvels of the time. Every day there appeared at the hospital a pretty, and fashionably-dressed young lady with a tribute of flowers or fruit or invalids' delicacies, and with an inquiry as to his progress towards recovery. On'-y that; hilt the message helped to brighten many a dark hour of suffering and to brace the hero for the stem fight 'mt life.

How. dark and bitter these hours were may be imagined when to all his bodily pain was added the grief of the teirible news, which was broken to him as gently as possible, that among the few victims of the (ire was the girl who sj soon was to have been his wife, and whom, by his splendid heroism, he thought he had saved. By a curious coincidence, as he learnt at the same time, the girl who really owed her life lo Mm was another Elsie, the daughter of i wealthy ranchman, who was staying at the hotel on the night of the tragedy. Some time before Harland was able to leave the hospital, the daily inquiries of the " other Elsie," to which he had begun to look forward eagerly, suddenly ceased, withont a word of explaua-1 tiou. I

It was another and a very different world into which ho now emerged from that he had loft. The storm-clouds had filled the sky while he had been lying on his bed of pain; the air was fuii of dhe sounds of war, the tramping of armed hosts, and the boom of caunun. Every possible recruit wu 5 wanted to Iced the llames of civil war, which had broken out between the North and the South, and Harland was among the fir it to find a new. field for'liis heroism as a soldier in the Union army, in his very first battle—that of Bull Run—he was badly wounded; but he recovered, to light again and again, winning laurels by his valour at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. When at last the war was ovcr, Harland, broken in health and crippled by his wounds, fell on evil days. No longer able to do compositor's work, lie wandered from one State to another, picking up a livelihood as best he could by any kind of menial labour; and after years of wandering and hardship came to an anchorage in lowa, where he married the widow of a small farm.:!, and settled down as proprietor of a

country grocery-store, stocked with the small capital his wife brought him. Meanwhile, what had become of til.! girl whose life he had so gallantly saved, and who had disappeared so strangely

and, as it seemed, so ungratefully? Tit? reason for her disappearance was as simple as it was inevitable. Sh» had received a summons to the death-lied of her father —a summons so urgent and unexpected that she had not even time to pay a farewell call at the hospitil where her hero was lying. A few weeks later her father had died, leaving her a large fortune; and her lirst journey after his death had been to New York, where she found to her dismay that her rescuer had flowi— where, no one knew. So far from forgetting him she had intended to provide liberally for his future. She searched f»r kirn everywlieie, hut could hud no trace of him; and it: was onlv some years later, when she liecame 'the wife of a wealthy man in Chicago, that she abandoned her searchj 13 useless.

Ono June day in 1890 a stranger call- r ed at Harland's small store in lowa. "Is your name Ueorge Harland J" !ie asked of the grizzled old soldier behind the counter. "That's my name, sir." "And you are the man," the stranger continued, •• who saved a young lady from an hotel lire in March, 1801'/' " The same, sir," replied the storekeeper, modestly. "Well, sir," said the unknown, "I guess you're the man I'-.'e been trying to find for the last two years; and right glad 1 am to have run you to earth at hist. Sir, I congratulate you; you are a fortunate man." And then, to the astonished ears of the shopkeeper, he unfolded his story—how the girl Harland had saved so heroically had hunted far and wide for him for years; how, even when she married and became a woman of wealth and fashion, she had always remembered him with gratitude; and how, when she die J, two years earlier, a. childless widow, she had left all her estate, valued at over 2,f100,000d015.,t0 one "George Harland, if he should ever be found, who saved my life and lost that ot the girl he loved ill the lire at the Hotel, in Now York, ill March, 1801." /"Mary," said the storekeeper, as, witli tears streaming down his cheeks, he put his arm round the waist of lis wife, who hud come into (he store in time to hear this remarkable story, "Mary, my girl, we're rich at last; to-morrow you shall have the finest silk gown I can buy in Dcs Moines."