A ROMANTIC HISTORY.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 2152, 23 November 1885, Page 2

A ROMANTIC HISTORY.

According to the Melbourne correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald there sailed for England a few days ago a young man whose career would furnish materials enough to construct a romance out of. • His father was a younger son of good family, and related collaterally to a baronet of old descent, living on a valuable estate in one of the midland counties, He was somewhat wild in his youth and a clever amateur actor. A junior clerkship was procured for him in the Treasury, and he used to spend as many of his evenings as lie could in one or other of the theatres, wliere he fell in love with and married a pretty girl, whose mother was the wardrobe-woman in the theatre from which her husband took her. Tho union gave great offence to his friends, who found very little difficulty in prevailing upon him to quit England and po out to Australia, accompanied by his wife, and furnished with £SOO over arid above their passage money. During the voyage a son was born them, and a serious disaster befell the child's father. He accidentally fell down the hold, and injured his spine so severely that he was bedridden from that time forth. He lingered for a twelvemonth- after llis landing, and died. His protracted illness had exhausted his resourcea, and his , young widow found herself' worse than penniless-somewhat in debt after paying the funeral expenses. But she was a brave little woman, and soon obtained an engagement at the Theatre Royal, under her maiden name, and was enabled to maintain and give a tolerable education to her boy. She died of cancer before he was seventeen, and his life .since then—which was about fivo years ago—has been one of vicissitudes, Latterly he has been acting as a waiter at one t>l the restaurants, where a certain inherited elegance of manner and refinement of accent on his part often caused me to speculate as to his history. By chance I had the opportunity of rendering him a trifling service, which encouraged his confidence, and he told me his personal history. A few months ago, glancing down the advertising columns of the 1 Times,' I noticed one inquiring for a missing heir, and the particulars given seemed to tajly with ; jjipsg of Mb own narrative. I called his attention to it, and the result was'the opening .up a correspondence with a firm of solicitors in Linooln's Inn Melds, followed, ill due time, by a. remittance from them and the information that he had succeeded to a baronetcy and £12,000 a-year. No less than three Jives had stood between him and it when the old possessor of the title died, but those had been all removed in the short space of eighteen months, One had been drowned while bathing near Mount Agneil, in Jersey, a second hadjlipped into a crevasse upon the Alps, and the third had broken his neck while riding, to hounds in his own county,