A TRUE MISER.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10022, 19 April 1910, Page 4

A TRUE MISER.

Very strange and very sad is the story of Charles Phillips, formerly of New Zealand, who died the other day in a Rowton House in London, apparently penniless. Philips is aaid to have been in business as an upholsterer in New Zealand and AuFtraila, before he went to London a few years ago. For a time he lived with a relative, and then went to the cheap lodging houses that bear their founder's name. There be lived a lonely life, having little to do with any of the other lodgers. No one knew anything about the old man. He appeared to be extremely poor, and would frequently beg for pennies, which he never returned, to buy food. But when he died, of old age, it was found that he had nearly £3,000 in a London bank, and he was believed at latest advices to have property in the colonies worth £lO,000. Then it was plain that the old man had been a miser, as greedy for wealth as any miser to be found in fiction. He had left his relative's roof because he could live more cheaply in a Rowton House. There he paid 3s 6d a week for his cubicule, and his meals sost him but a few pence a day. He rarely had more than two meals, and these were scanty. He had no compunction about borrowing from wretched men with only a few pence between themselves and starvation. Just before he died he borrowed a penny to buy an egg. "I have given him eggs and tobacco," said Charles Collier, a labourer. "I thought he had not a penny in the world. The worst of it is I had only a few coppers myself, as I had been , out of work for eleven weeks, and I f

could have done with every halfpenny In fact, I wanted food myself." Cheapness was a craze with the old man. His nephew relates that one night when his uncle came to him he produced i cheap little 'musical box, and listened to its jingling tune with immense pleasure. There are two wills, one leaving his money to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the other bequeathing it to the sister society for the protection of animals. Neither of ther.e societies knows anything aboufc the wills. When the mail left the old man's relatives were preparing to contest the later will, and there was a prospect of a good deal of the estate going to the lawyers. But what an ironical drama—years of lonely miserliness, to save money to be squabbled over when he had gone . whence nothing can be taken! i