Show JEALOUS WOXANS WAR ING How The Letter Miscarried Through a Few Words Written on the Envelope l How little wesuspect the real weight 1 which ROHMiimes attaches to a line of 1 writing on the face of a letter envelope A friend in CalifornIa tells me of a casein case-in point A girl living in one of the southern counties of the MAte was de wrted by her lover whom she tracked t or believed she did to a e8rtemMUlr e ia Oakland After waiting patiently for a J a o 7 0 J W response to her successive letters begging him to return she wrote him a final letter let-ter warning him that if he did not give her some satisfaction within fortyeight hours she would hunt him down and kill him Jn orderthat no part of her plan should miscarry she registered this letter Thea it occurred to her that although tho process of registry would ensure its delivery the address given in the subscription sub-scription itmight be delivered to some other person representing her lover and she would still be left l in doubt whether he had personally received it So she wrote on tho face of the envelope Postmaster Post-master will please deliver only to the person per-son addressed n Hearing nothing in response for some days and not receiving her letter back as she believed she would if it had not been delivered she took a train for the north and meeting her lover face to face in a San Francisco street shot him dead Then it was discovered that the fatal letter had never been delivered but that the pc tmaster after making several vain efforts to find the man himself had given the job up as hopeless and returned it to the postoffice where it was registered it must have crossed paths with the girl on her way from home to the city Her relatives who are of course interested in preventing any proof of the deliberateness de-liberateness of her deed are anxious to get hold of that letter and destroy it The friends of the man who was killed are equallyanxious to obtain possession of it as the most important link in the evidence evi-dence of intent which will be used in the prosecution Both sides have appealed understand to the authorities of postoffice department depart-ment I was talking with a lawyer last evening who has been employed in the law branch of the department and he assures as-sures me that tho only decision the department de-partment can give is adverse to the girls interests If the legal representatives of the murdered man demand the letter it must be given them as postmasters are not authorized to take official notice of instructions such l1S she wrote on her envelope en-velope But tha girls friends will hardly rest quiet under such a decision if there is a court in California before whom they can go for a writ of injunction or mandamus man-damus The controversy if it comes up in the civil courts will 1 doubtless cause a re overhauling of all the law on tho subject of the ownership of a letter after it passes out of the hands of its author and into those of Uncle Sam The precedents are pretty well settled now but I never heard of a precedent yet which could not be overturned if the lawyers knew how togo to-go to work about itlCatc fields Washington Wash-ington |