Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 166, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 July 1910 — OIL MAGNATE OWNS A GHOST [ARTICLE]

OIL MAGNATE OWNS A GHOST

It Was the Prize Package Given With Mexican Palace That H. Clay Pierce Bought. H. -Clay Pierce, St. Louis oil magnate, Is now the owner of the Borda Gardens at Ceurnavaca, Mexico, and may be said to be the custodian of the ghost of th 6 Borda Gardens. Nothing was said about it when Mr. Pierce paid $15,000 for the historic spot which was the favorite summer haunt of Emperor Maximilian and Queen Carlotta in the days of Mexico’s splendor as an empire. But It is to be supposed that the ghost, having occupied the gardens without leave these many years, will continue to do so, and an occasional glimpse of the ghostly Intruder may be vouchsafed to the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Pierce after Mr. Pierce has spent SIOO,OOO In restoring the gardens and they are ready to entertain their friends there. Mrs. Pierce, who will be the mistress of the mansion of the mad empress, Is an Edwardsville (Ill.) woman, the daughter of Maj. William M. Russell Pickett. Before her marriage to Mr. Pierce she was Mrs. Virginia Pickett Burrowes. The mansion, in recent years, has divided into several suites and hds been let to tenants. These say that they .often see the ghost. Whose ghost Is it, and why it haunts the Borda Gardens nobody pretends to know, but it is the belief of the locality that the ghostly appearances have some relation to burled treasure and a dark crime of the long ago.—St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

How Hay Wrote “Little Breeches.” On the train, as I Journeyed to New York, I entertained myself by writing ‘Little Breeches.” The thing was done merely for my own amusement, without the smallest thought of print. But when I showed it to Whitelaw Reid he seized the manuscript and published it in the Tribune. By that time the lilt and swing of the' Pike county ballad had taken possession of me. I was filled with the Pike county spirit, as it were, and the humorous side of my mind was entertained by Its rich possibilities. Within a week after the appearance of "Little Breeches” in print all the Pike county ballads were written. After that the Impulse was completely gone from me. . . . There were no more Pike county ballads in me and there never have been any since. Let me tell you a queer thing about that From the hour when the last of the ballads was written until now I have never been able to feel that they were mine, that my mind had anything to do with their creation or that they bore any trace of kinship to my thought or my Intellectual impulses. They seem utterly foreign to me—as foreign as if I had first encountered them In print as the work of somebody else. It is a strange feeling.—Letter from John Hay to G. C. Eggleston, quoted In “Reoellections of a Varied Life.”