THE LOST LEGION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 29, 27 February 1909, Page 3

THE LOST LEGION.

ENOCH AItDEXS OF ILKiIJ SOCIETY. A short ■time ago a. sensation was created by the finding of a baronet who had been living'the life of a hermit for many years on tlic fringe of Hie Art-tic regions. While oil an expedition in the luuun territory, lie mysteriously disappeared, apparently oi his own jree will. After waiting tor the usual period, the tourts granted leave to presume his dentil, and his wife married again, while his son assumed the. title ami estates. .Now that lie has come hack to life, some cuniplivations may be looked for. 'J'lie ease ,seenis a. curious one, hut it is by no means so rare as must people would suppose. Anybody who has knocked about the world a good deal in out-of-the-way places can probably call to mind men lie lias met who have, in la similar way, eil'acod themselves from the social circles in which they were once prominent, freely surrendering rank and wealth so that they may live, "tlie world forgetting, bv the world forgot." When I was living in Jamaica a few years ago (writes a correspondent of a Home paper),, 1 was well acquainted with a man who is second in succession to an old Irish peerage. At one time lie was a familiar figure in London and Dublin society, and he had plenty of money with which to sustain hi«s position. But he grew tired of the social treadmill, and decided to dwell among the Jamaican negro peasants exactly as one of themselves.

He retired to a remote part oi the Pedro .Mountains, where a white man is seldom seen, lived in a palm-tliatehed, wattle-aud-mud hut, cultivated a few yums, sweet potatoes and banauas, and married a mulatto woman. No; she was not a star-eyed, dusky queen of the orthodox novelette brand; there was no second edition of "Paul and Virginia" in his sordid romance. She was just un ugly, thick-lipped, commonplace mulatto, unable to read, write, or speak English. When i lust visited him in his hut, he was lying in the shade of a bread-fruit tree, drinking rum and cocoauut-water, and smoking the coarse, native "jack-ass-rope" tobacco, in company with two negro cronies, whose yam-patches adjoined 'his own. His throe coll'ee-colore'd children were playing with the little black pigs in the sty near by. The eldest boy came.running up to me. "Beg you one quatlie, massa!" he cried, asking the stranger at once for a copper, just as any other little West Indian nigger would do. And some day he may be the legal heir to that Irish peerage I In Panama, in the dissolute, devil-uiay-care days of the French Canal Company, I knew a French marquis who had "gone Fantee" in a similar way. His name is blazoned all down the. scroll of French history, for his ancestors stood at the right hand of Bourbon after Bourbon. He was keeping a little rumshop and gambling-den in the lowest quarter of Panama when I made his acquaintance, and his patrons were negroes, half-caste Indians, and Chinamen. He w-as a very wealthy man, owning large estates in France and Martinique; but he let his money accumulate in the bank, only drawing on it now aad then to get some hard-tip compatriot out of a mess. One night I saw him take a rum-stained cheque-book from behind the bar and write a cheque for ever six thousaud dollars, as a free girt to a friend of his—a French engineer, whose accounts had got muddled up as a consequence of too much roulette. 1 have seen this eccentric Frenchman fell a hulking negro with such a stunning blow that the man was unconscious for a day; and it was said that he once broke a Chinaman's neck with his bare hands, as you might wring a chicken's. The Celestial had drawn a knife on a white man. Captain Kettle was a milk-and-watery person by comparison. These Enoch Ardens ot hi«u society are to be found in odd lounrs all over the World.