A GENTLEMAN HORSEWHIPPED BY A LADY IN THE CLARENDON HOTEL.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 228, 24 January 1885, Page 3

A GENTLEMAN HORSEWHIPPED BY A LADY IN THE CLARENDON HOTEL.

Though the female flagelator has become a permanently-established institution in America, she has not yet been fully acclimatised in New Zealand. Somehow the climate, soil, and social environments of British communities are not favourable to the development of the breed. Our women exhibit a:i old-fashioned preference for the broomstick, flatiron, or rolling-pin, and the use of the horsewhip is comparatively rare. It is only once and again that a strongminded female of masculine proclivities bares a- muscular arm, and with Amazonian resolution goes for some obnoxious individual of the opposite sex from whom she has sustained real or imaginary wrong. A ca.se of this kind occurred the other day. In the Brief Mention column of last week's Obseuyku there was a mild, paragraph giving currency to a rumour that a. certain

lady who is a recent arrival in the Colony contemplated taking- over the management of a. well-known establishment in Upper Queen-street, where the hospitality is of the most liberal character, and entertainment is provided for man and beast. A lady at the Clarendon Hotel, whom we will designate as Mrs F. — though she was formerly known in Auckland by another, and, it is to be presumed, hei' maiden name — appears to have imagined that the paragraph in question applied to her, and, egged on to mischief by a parcel of men who ought to have known better than to involve a woman in an unseemly, if not disreputable, proceeding, she attributed the authorship of the obnoxious rumour to a young man named Prentice, a lodger in the house.

In guileless innocence of the fate that awaited him, this gentleman was going into the supper-room between eleven and twelve o'clock the other night, when he received a mysterious warning of pending danger from the barman. " I wouldn't go into supper if I was you, sir !" was the friendly admonition of the "• beev-jerkeiv' Treating the warning as a joke, Mr P. was standing near the outer room bidding " G-ood-bye "' to a friend, when he was accosted by a rather prepossessing lady, who desired to have a few minutes private conversation with him in the apartment above mentioned.

Such an appeal to a young- man of galhmtry was, of course, not thrown away, and lie at once followed 31 rs F. into the room, took oil' hi.s bat, removed bis pipe from his mouth, and politely intimated that be was at her service. After a short preliminary parley, his fair interviewer, to use bis own expressive phrase, "froze on to him," and, disclosing a, horsewhip from thn mysterious recesses of her fashionable attire, begun to lay on the strokes with a. vigorous hand. Ho wovci 1 , ho took his gvt'.el with Spartan equanimity, which \va-< rather fortunate under the circumstances, seeing that a number of men who are said to have instigated the lady to adopt these extreme measures were standing in Ihe background ready to act us :i reinforcement if their services were required. Mr Prentice seems to have emerged from the fray without any visible marks of violence, and ho declares it is not his intention to seek any legal redress against the lady, Avho was labouring- under strong mental excitement" from a,n imaginary sense of injury, and was prompted by a set of blackguards who had no compunction about involving her hi an unsee.mingly squabble.