THE ROMANCE OF A RING.
r To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR:1 SIR,—Some time ago you admitted, I think, the subject of " Coincidences " to your correspondence columns, and, if you care to reopen the subject, the following story may be of interest. Many years ago, when at Oxford, my father gave me as an heirloom a ring presented to him by an old friend, and bearing an inscription stating that it contained the hair of the Duke of Wellington. This ring I gave to my wife on our marriage in 1876. In October, 1879, when we were on a visit to Mr. W. Arkwright, of Sutton Scars- dale, my wife felt the ring slip off her finger at the dinner- table, and, although careful search was made, nothing more was seen or heard of it for eighteen years, so far as we were concerned. At the commencement of this year, how- ever, my wife received a letter from her half-sister (Mrs. Hodge) in New Zealand, which stated incidentally that a church in which she was interested out there had received unexpected help some years ago from a curious source. Her sister (Miss White) had sent out from England at her request some gloves purchased at Bides, and on trying on a pair of these gloves she, to her astonishment, found inside one of them a ring containing the hair of the Duke of Wellington, which had evidently been drawn off the finger unconsciously by some one trying on the glove at Bides. Unable to find the owner of the ring and not liking to keep it, Mrs. Hodge thought it would be a fair thing to sell it and apply the proceeds to the church fund, She did BO, and the purchaser was a Mr. Frank Ark- wright, of Overton, Marston, New Zealand, whose grand- mother had given the ring to my father, and who has most kindly replaced it in my possession. Now, Sir, here are a series of coincidences which are only likely to happen once in a lifetime. That of all the thousands of people who purchase gloves my wife's half-sister should have lighted upor this particular pair, and unknown to herself and to Bid should have sent out this ring in them to her sister in,; Antipodes, and that there it should have been recover& the house of a cousin of the Mr. Arkwright in whose4
it had been lost eighteen years ago, surely goes that sometimes, at any rate, truth is stranger th As a minor coincidence I may, perhaps, mentio letter which, by the merest chance, happmed to finding of the ring was dated from Wellington, in New
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