HETTY GREEN DEAD.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 July 1916, Page 7

HETTY GREEN DEAD.

RICHEST WOMAN IN THE WORLD. Mrs. Hetty Green, America's greatest woman financier, who has just died, was one of New York's most famous figures localise of her wealth and peculiarities. She was born in 1835, and her husband, Edward H. Open, died fourteen years ;>go. ''.Such a lonely little figure'!" wrote a New York co-respondent recently. "A withered leaf, it seems strangely tossed in the great financial current of Broadway. Follow this little old woman in rusty black and see her enter the Chemical National Bank. She is not the charwoman. The charwoman has no clothes of such ancient date as hers; the alpaca gown that has weathered many seasons, the black woollen cape that has shaped itself to the shoulders as they have bowed through the last ten years, and the tousled bonnet, with its little lunch of flowers that faded with the millinery of many summers past. Tht shabby little old woman is worth £20,-000,1)00-some estimates say; she is Hetty Rowland Robinson Green, greatest mistress of finance the world has ever seen. She lias more ready money at her command than any one individual. Wall Street waits on lier coffers. To her oldfashioned mahogany desk comes a procession of bank presidents, hat in hand, railroad magnates, bowing low, and rich iMrectors lnunbly making obeisance. Even the city of New York, in need, has brought its plea to her, its richest citixenness. Coolly, calculating, she listens, balancing want and entreaty with a firm nicety of judgment. Then she drives her Larjain shrewdly. Yet Hetty Green is really a bankrupt to-day—in desire. With money to buy all the world holds for sale, it yet holds nothing that she .vould like. The girl stenographer who takes her dictation probably has a lighter heart under a new spring gown. Poor Hetty Green, least happy woman in New York! The mention of her name raises a smile at her parsimonious eccentricities. It was not always so. Once Hetty Green was young, brilliant, and beautiful, one of the belles of New York and Saratoga society. The eligible men of the day were all at her feet. From this portrait of Hetty Green look at tin' Hetty Green of to-day, with the faded eyes that are done with sweet smiling, and the grim mouth, hard with the stem lines about it. Beginning with romance and ending with pathos — •itranger far than any fiction is ihe chronicle of this woman's career Though she now lives like a pauper because she prefers to, she comes of a family that bus had social position and riches unlimited for generations. She reads her title clear to the Mayflower passenger list, and her ancestral shield is starred with colonial governorships. New England, to this day, smooths its apron complacently, and adjusts is spectacles proudly as it adds: "She is a Robinson ol the Howland-Robinson line, and a Howland of the Round Hill Howlands, you know!"