STRANGE ENGAGEMENT RINGS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 238, 13 November 1909, Page 6

STRANGE ENGAGEMENT RINGS

During the hearing of a breach of promise ease tried at the Macron Quarter .Sessions, Co. Cork, it transpired that I the engagement-ring which the defendant had presented to the plaintiff was. originally made for the purpose of putting through a pig's nose. I lu another case heard some time back, the defendant stated that he did not consider himself called upon to fullil his promise to marry the plaintiff as the en-gagement-ring on which much of the evidence turned came from the interior of a Christmas cracker. The jury, however, while not traversing the truth of this statement, showed by the verdict that they did nut consider that the defendant's meanness had invalidated the ! significance of his gift. I PISTOL AND HOUSE-SHOE KINGS.

No niggard spirit was it that prompted a young man to have his fiancee's en-gagement-ring made from a portion of an old horse-shoe which he found on his way to the lady's house to ,put the fatclul question. Another iron .substitute was a section cut from the barrel of a piistol which many year, previously had been the Instrument of avenging the outraged hunor of a uicmiiei' of the bridegroom's family. In this instance, however, the dull hue of the grim memento was relieved by tile insertion of a ruby, an opal, a sapphire, and an emerald, the initial letters of which formed the bride's Christian name.

By the advice of a lady on whom his affections were fixed, a Liverpool gentleman was rash enough to engage in a law action. Though he gained the day, the nominal damages of one-farthing left him a pecuniary loser. When subsequently he became engaged to his fair adviser, he had the small bronze con, that hail constituted his legal award made into a ring, which wiis accepted by his future wife in the same spirit of humor in which it was oliercu. LOST A TOOTH—FOUND A HUSBAND. Distinctly novel is an engagement-ring composed of tobacco. Such was the present made to his fiancee by a member of a family that owed Us wealth to the possession of extensive plantations. The fragrant leaf, so strangely enlisted ill Cupid's service, was, by subjecting it to an indurating process, made to assume the consistency and appearance of iron, the sombre tone of which was lit up by a single brilliant of considerable value. To he knocked over by it bicycle, even though its rider be a lady, is not pleasant; still los so when you rise from tiic ground minus a tooth. Such some agi was the painful experience which gained an English gentleman an introduction to his future wife. On their becoming engaged he made the customary presentation of a ring, 'which took the form cf a souvenir of their initial meeting, being nothing less than his deplaced tooth surrounded by a circlet of gems.

FROM AN EGYPTIAN MUMMY. A grissly memento in the possession of his wife of a London clergyman is a ring made from the Wood of an uncle who was badly wounded while Ughling for <:.-iribaldi aud Italian freedom. Di" Mauiui, of Naples, the celebrated petrilicr at human remains, attended him during iiis illness, and on his convalescence presented him with a ring made from his own blood. On his return to England he gave this to his nephew, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, whose whimsical fancy prompted him, on his becoming engaged a year or two later, to use il as an engagement-ring. In preference to a conventional jeweller's bauble a well-known actress selected as an engagement ring an-aimilet that had erstwhile encircled the finger of an Egyptian mummy. An outre choice certainly, -but not so ghastly as was that of a young society lady whose lover, at her earnest entreaty, purchased for lie) engagement-ring a golden hoop that wa s reputed in the course of a couple of centuries to have been Avorn by no fewer than seven murderers.