ADVENTURES OF A SCOTCH. M.P.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1762, 12 July 1888, Page 4

ADVENTURES OF A SCOTCH. M.P.

The London correspondent of the Irish Times Bays:—The perils of legislative travel are still a reality as we learn from the strange experience of a Scotch member, who, being to the Highlands bound on Wednesday last took his seat in a second class carriage at the Great Northern Terminus, St. Pancras. It wanted a miuute or two to the point of departure and the legislator was comfortably buried in. his rugs and his newspaper when the carriage door opened, and to him entered a well-dressed, welllooking lady, whom he described as fat, fair, and forty. She had with her, he remembered, a sealskin sacqtie, and his recollection is still more alive to tho fact that her luggage was completed by an oblong wicker basket, such as a certain firm of caterers employ to pack small picnic luncheons in. The lady laid the basket on the seat, opened her sacque, rummaged in it, showed agitation, fumbled in her drts?, looked on the floor, on the seat, in her gloves, and as the second signal sounded made a dash for the door exclaiming in feminine alarm at the loss of her ticket. The M.P. waited in wondering unsuspicion for his fellow-traveller's return, and when the train steamed off without her reappearance he concluded that she had not had time to find the carriage and had hurried elsewhere to save the journey. This conclusion soon begot another which was that he was meanwhile custodian of the property left behind, and, forthwith assuming the function, he laid hands on the basket to shift it, more to his liking, or as he explained, he prepared to stretch his feet. The basket slipped from his hands, fell on the floor, and at once became vocal with cries of the little animal so well known as the squallus domesticus, or common {infant. The member owns himself more than a trifle taken aback by the position, but he speedily tore open the wicker hasp which fastened the basket, and found a fiue baby comfortably packed away with flannels and feeding-bottle. There was nothing for it but to travel with this unexpected toy to the next station, where the basket and its contents were handed over to the police, 'the member was obliged to bre k his journey while ho made the statement, and this para

graph is in effect the traveller's tale as he has related it in letters to friends here. That this is a case of au unnatural mother and abandoned offspring is suggested by the fact that the derelict has not been claimed, or at any rate was not claimed up to Saturday morning, nor does it appear that the lady has been traced.