HERRY GREEN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9103, 1 June 1908, Page 7

HERRY GREEN.

A MISTRESS 0? FINANCE. Such a lonely little figure! A •withered leaf, it seems strangely tossed in thu 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 an- '■ cient date as hers; the alpaca gown that has weathered' many seasons, the black woolled cape that has : shaped itself to the shoulders as they »have bowed through the last ten years, and the tousled bonnet, with "its little bunch of flowers that faded ..-■with the millinpry of many summers "past. The shabby little old woman is •worth £12,000,000, even £20,000,000 ;aome estimates say; she is Hetty Howland Kobinson Green, greatest mistress of finance the world : <has ever 'seen. She has more :: ready money at her command than any one individual, according to the "Broadway Magazine." Wall street waits on her coffers. To iher old-fashioned mahogany desk ■ comes a procession of bank presidents, hat in hand, railroad magnates, bowleg low, and rich directors humbly making obeisance. Even the city of New York, in need, has brought its plea to her, its richest citizeness. '• Coolly, calculatingly, she listens, i balancing want and entreaty With a firm nicety o£ judgment. Then she drives her bargain shrewdly. Yet Hetty Green is really a bankrupt to-day—in desire. With money to buy all the world holds for sale, .•yet holds nothing that she wouU like. 'The girl steonographer 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 a*, the Hetty Green of to-day, with the faded eyes that are done with sweet smiling, and the grim hard with the stern lines it. Beginning with romance and ending with pathos—-stranger far than any fiction is the chronicle of this woman's career. Though she now lives like a pauper because she prefers to, she comes of a family i-that has had social position and riches unlimited for generations. She reads £her title clear to the Mayflower pas»*senger list, and her ancestral shield la starred with colonial governorships. New England to this day smoothes its apron complacently, and adjusts its spectacles proudly as it adds: • "She is a Robinson of the Howlandi Robinson line, and a Howland of the ;Bound Hill,Howland, you know!"