RICH MEN IN GARRETS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 318, 3 June 1911, Page 9

RICH MEN IN GARRETS.

ECCENTRICITIES OF MILLIONAIRE HERMITS. The "vanity of riches" has never been more strikingly demonstrated than by the story of Mr. G. E. Dering, who has recently died at Lockley Hall, Wclwyn. For the greater part of half a century I this lord of many acres and of a quar-1 ter of a million of nionoy has been content to lead the life of a hermit in his magnificent home surrounded by a thousand acres of park land. His valuable pictures—by Holbein, Fra Bartolomeo, and other old pietures—have stood for a generation stacked three deep with their faoes turned to the walls; a generation of dust had settled undisturbed on Dresden vases, gold and enamel clocks, and costly furniture. Gorgeous carriages, rich and heraUlki painting, lay rotting in his. coach-house j his front door Was fiv'ergroU'n with ivy as high as the stone shield of arms that crowned it. Not even a lamb was allowed to bleat within hearing of the lord of this desolate mansion; and even the high road was deserted that no sound of traffic should vex his ears. Thus, amidst dust, decay and desolation, lived and died the owner of £25,000 a year, shunning the world and scorning his wealth. And so it has always been and will be. One man squanders his gold; another hoards or despsiesit. It is but a few years since one of our wealthiest baronets—a man with a rent roll of £30,000 a year—died in a miserable attic near Waterloo Bridge. His sordid room was papered with illustrations from the weekly papers; he never crossed the threshold except for an occasional solitary ramble by night; no one was ever allowed to enter his dreary sanctum, his meals being left for him outside the door; and his long days were spent looking through his attic window on the moving panorama of the Thames. While Sir Herbert Delves Broughton was sitting at his attic window, a man infinitely richer was walking the streets of St. Petersburg in the guise of a beggar, pocketing the alms of charitable passers-by, and gleefully earning back his spoil to his miserable two-storeyed cottage in one of the city's slums. This was the only "palace" of the multi-millionaire SolodovnikolV, where he lived, among his decrepit sticks of furniture, with an old housekeeper. Here he would sit shivering through the cold winter clays, too miserly to allow himself a fire, or even to brighten the dark house with the light of a solitary candle. For twenty years he was only Known to wear one suit, a "thing of shreds and patches,'' scarcely a vestige of the original cloth remaining. And yet this sordid living hermit was one of the greatest land-owners and railway-magnates in all Russia—a man who left behind him a hundred million roubles. Far wealthier than many kings, he led a life from which most peasants would have shrunk. A few years ago there was no wealthier man in all Paris than M. Golasson, who for a generation had lived as a pauper in two rooms of his magnificent palace in the Rue Galilee. During all this period he never once left his splendid prison, and no one was ever allowed to enter it except his one faithful attendant, who kept him supplied with his daily food of bread and eggs. As in Mr. Dering's case it was the death of a father that consigned him to his hermit life, so with M. Colasson it was the tragic death by (Ire of a loved nephew and heir in 1874 that decided him to forswear the world and all its vanities. Within a few weeks of the death of M. Colasson there died in an attic in a Berlin slum one Herr Sehwarz, who was known to and pitied by his neighbors as the poorest of the poor. He sallied out daily into the fashionable quarters, dressed in rags and carrying a sack in which he collected crusts. He lived alone and died alone, a mere bag of hones —surrounded by riches; for in his room was found £BO.OOO in gold coins, stored in scores of jars and bottles, and in bank notes, with which his pillow and mattress were stuffed. For many years Mr. Phelps Stokes, one of America's richest men. has lived in one of the slums of New Vork, leading the life of the poor among whom he works, and spending on himself in a year less than his income for a day. A few years ago Mr. J. Eads How turned his back on his palace in St. Louis and renounced his right to a million of money, to spend his days in voluntary poverty in one of the most wretched slums in the city. Here, in a solitary room in a home for waifs, the ex-Croesus cooks his own meals, makes his own bed, and counts himself extravagant if he spends more than two dollars a week on himself.