A MUTUAL SURPRISE.

Waipukurau Press, Issue 310, 19 September 1908, Page 2

A MUTUAL SURPRISE.

Half tragic and half comic confusion was caused at one of the Paris police stations recently by the presence of a corpse, a drunken woman, and a coffin, lhe police had brought the body of an unknown man, probably a tramp, who had died on the banks of the Seine, to the station, intending to have it conveyed to the Morgue next morning. During the night a drunken woman was shut up by mistake in the same room as the corpse. She lay down beside it, quite unconscious of its presence, and slept soundly all night. In the morning the undertakers came with a coffin, which they set down beside her, and, mistaking the woman for the corpse, were about to lift her into the coffin, when she bounded up with a scream, and rushed out into the street, where she fainted. The undertaker’s men also got such a fright that one of them was on the point of swooning. He thought that the corpse had come back to life. Both he and the woman were taken to a druggist for attendance, and there, as the woman recovered, she again screamed each time that she saw a blue coat. Bor a long while after she seemed still to be convinced that the police had intended to bury her alive.