COME TO LIFE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 982, 25 July 1882, Page 3

COME TO LIFE.

Writes a Melbourne correspondent : " I read in a paper the other day the following paragraph, taken from a Queensland journal: "Some years since, a resident of Queensland, whose life was heavily insured, was drowned away in the interior. The corpse could not be recovered, but the insurance money was claimed by his disconsolate relatives. The strangest tbiQg about this mysterious affair is that the body of the lamented deceased has lately been perambulating the streets of San Francisco, looking none the worse for its untimely end in Australia,. This may or may not be true, for] I have in my time read many stories of a similar character which wore gratuitous inventions. But this is a fact : About ten years ago, a well-known Southerner, who was supposed to have made a big fortune, partly out of tan-pits and mining, and whose life was insured in English and French companies for, I believe, some £B,OOO, went home. Fourteen months afterwards came the news that he bad died of enteritis at Quebec, while on his way to Australia. I am told that insurance policies wer« paid in full ; but, anyhow, I, who have a happy faculty of remembering a face or' voice, for even forty years, saw my deceased friend in the flesh not a thousand miles from Salford only seven months ago. An Anglo-Australian, an intimate friend of mine, met him about two years since at "Woolwich, on the occasion of the launching o&an ironclad, struck up an acquaintance and diaed with him the same evening at Upper Norwood, where he had a pretty little establishment, since tenanted by another distinguished Australian who got his money from the sheep's back. My friend, who had never Been him before, received from him his portrait as a souvenir. I was confident 1 recognised on the back of that portrait the well known caligraphy which had adorned many a cheque and bill passed through my hands twenty years ago, and, to make sure, I looked up the writer. He and the successful deceased were one and the same person, though he, who use to shave j clean, now affects Dundrearies. He has got rid of the old partner in his joys and gorrows, and now runs in double harness with a lady who must be at least a quarter of a century his junior. 1 invented an excuse for visiting him, and am certain he remembered me, though here escaped on my side no sign of recognition."