* * * * *

CONTINENTAL INTELLIGENCE.

An extraordinary domestic tragedy is reported from a remote province of Poland.  A beautiful young woman, named Vera Alexandrina Polianowski, who had been married only about two years, was expecting the return home of her husband, a sailor.  During his absence of five months a mournful calamity had befallen her in an affection of the larynx, which threatened to deprive her temporarily of the power to articulate.  Realising her impending affliction, she had taught a grey parrot, which her husband had left with her, to exclaim repeatedly from just inside the door of her cottage, in joyous accents that bore no inconsiderable resemblance to her own once melodious voice, these touching words, “Enter, dearest Vladimir, and console me for my misfortune!”

It chanced, however, that before marrying Vladimir Polianowski, the sailor, Vera Alexandrina had had a lover in poor circumstances named Vladimir Crackovitch, whom, with the thoughtlessness of a beautiful young girl, she had encouraged to get rich as quickly as he could in America and then return to claim her as his bride.  Vladimir Crackovitch had taken her at her word.  With the silent determination of a great soul, he had amassed about a hundred thousand dollars in America in less than four years, and only two or three minutes before Vera Alexandrina’s husband was due to arrive he himself stood at the cottage door with folded arms, asking himself if he should or should not enter and reproach Vera Alexandrina for her inconstancy.

His hesitation was suddenly overcome by the parrot.  “Enter, dearest Vladimir, and console me for my misfortune!” it cried eagerly from within, and, not for an instant doubting that it was an invitation from the woman whom he still loved fondly in spite of her perfidy, and being unaware of her laryngeal affliction, he bounded into the house and hurried from room to room until he found Vera Alexandrina Polianowski.

But Vladimir, the sailor, had already in the meantime, from the top of an adjacent lane, beheld Vladimir Crackovitch at the door of his home, and, being a man of the most blindly passionate and jealous impulses, his next procedure may be imagined.

Several hours later a neighbour called at the cottage and discovered the three corpses in one sad heap:  Vera Alexandrina Polianowski, shot through the breast; at her side, Vladimir Crackovitch, with a bullet in each eye; and, still clutching his revolver, Vladimir, the sailor, seated upon his grim cushion of the dead, his back supported against the wall under the domestic lamplit icon, with a smile of hellish satisfaction frozen upon his lips and the remaining three bullets buried in his heart.

The above is not necessarily a true story.  It is a specimen of the small-print news with which the rather young Assistant Sub-Editor of The Dullandshire Chronicle (established 1763) is permitted, occasionally, to divert those of The Chronicle’s subscribers who take an intelligent interest in continental affairs.