DICK WINSHIP’S DUEL.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1057, 20 January 1883, Page 3

DICK WINSHIP’S DUEL.

Speaking of Dick Winship recalls his famous duel with the Frenchman at Marseilles. Dick was then Second Lieutenant of our Scorpion, stationed there at the time, and, as usual, kept the whole fleet and half the town on nettles through his endless practical jokes. The slang expression forFrenchmon in those days wi.s ‘ frog-eaters, ’ and the wife of a French captain of military having presented her lord with twins, Dick had the ‘nerve’ >0 tender the happy father, at a public banquet, stuffed group, consisting of a big frog holding on its knees a couple of smaller ones. Of course there was a challenge, and when the captain’s second appeared, Winship, as the challenged party, gravely insisted on the duel being fought in the dark, with pistols, one shot only being allowed to each man. This new addition to the code made a terrible stir, but ns Dick held firm, the Frenchman was finally forced to submit. Oh the appointed day, after dinner, the principals were placed, blindfolded and pistol in hand, in a room at a hotel from which every particle of light had been excluded. At a given signal on the closed door, the antagonists removed their bandages to find themselves in absolute darkness, listening to the beating of their own hearts, and each afraid to fire first, for fear of thus exposing his location to the other. Dick quietly took off his shoes, and feeling for the chimney- in front of which ha had taken care to be placed—he crept up the flue, descended through a trap-door in the roof, slipped into a carriage and rejoined his dinner party, which at once devoted itself to making a night of it,' m the highest glee possible. The next morning they returned to the hotel and opened the room, which had been as silent as the grave all night. Kneeling in his corner, every muscle quivering with the unbearable suspense, was the milita captain, his auburn hair turned white by the horrors of that interminable might.