A man named Reuben Allender Berson, who calls himself a
graduate in honours, and is certainly a man of attainments, was sentenced on Wednesday to five years' penal servitude for bigamy. He seems to have passed his life in marrying and seducing women. He was twice married legally, and once by a quasi-legal ceremony ; was once convicted under the Bastardy Act, and was found when arrested to be engaged or on the point of engagement to thirty women. The most extraordinary fact about his career is that he taught one of his victims, an Irish ser- vant-girl named Morgan, whom he cheated by a mock marriage, Arabic, and during his detention before trial wrote to her in that tongue asking her to perjure herself to save him, and to bring him some tobacco. The poor girl, in simple perplexity, consulted her employer as to what should be done, and he forwarded the whole matter to the Treasury. This is not the case merely of an educated criminal, but of a crimbaal who must have taken enormous pains to educate one of the humblest of his victims for no apparent purpose, unless he intended ultimately to fly to Syria.
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