A ROMANTIC TRAGEDY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 2617, 20 April 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

A ROMANTIC TRAGEDY.

This is a true story from Mexico. The heroine, a lovely brunetto named Lydia, had need to consult a young French doctor from a malady from which she suffered. At his first visit she fell iu love with him, and by way of fee she offered him a red rose from her hair, which he gallantly placed in his button-hole. So ended Act I. Act 11. opened at the house of another lovely young invalid who had also sent for the same young French doctor. Seeing tiic rose in his coat, she coquettishly asked him to give it to her, and he, little thinking that he had seriously committed himself with its original donor by receiving it, laughingly consented. Act 111. opened after the lapse of one day, and we then find Mdlle Lydia, more than ever enamoured of the doctor, vowing revenge for what she considers his cruel slight. Soon after the young doctor himself arrived upon the scene to see his patient, who reappeared, carryincrjwith her aguitar and followed by a faithful domestic with a tray of light refreshments. These latter were offered to the ill-starred young doctor, and, as he ate, the belle Mexicaine kept up the melo dramatic character of the incident by playing softly a funereal dirge upon her guitar. The reason for this lugubrious music was all too soon made evident, for it quickly transpired that the cake and wine the young Frenchman had eaten were poisoned, and in spite of his friend's efforts he died in agony a few hours later ; and just before he breathed his last he heard that the jealous Lydia had herself died, also of poison. To complete the chapter of horrors, news was brought that the other girl to whom the rose had been civen had also been poisoned. So that on the morrow three corpses were borne to the cemetery. Whilst sincerely hoping that belle Mcxkninn of the Lydia type are rare, it is impossible not to recognise iu the details of this tragic idyll of the sunny South-West a ready- made libretto for a stirring grand opera of the Carmen-school. —Figaro.