People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 February 1893 — YOUNG AT EIGHTY YEARS. [ARTICLE]

YOUNG AT EIGHTY YEARS.

A Chilian Woman Who Is Remarkably Well Preserved for Her Age. “Perhaps the most remarkable woman in the world lives in Santiago, Chili,” said Robert A. Bonham, an American who has spent several years in South America, to a Boston Globe reporter. “She is apparently a well-pre-served woman of thirty-five, rather good looking, spry as a girl and a pronounced coquette, yet it is known positively that she is eighty years old, and may be much older. She has a granddaughter who looks old enough to be her mother. This remarkable woman is of Spanish extraction, a native of Peru, and her name is Boockman, her second husband, now dead, having been a German. Middle-aged people aver that she was a grown woman when | they were chilclren and that she does not look a day older now than she did then. She is regarded with superstitious awe by the more ignorant of the natives, over whom she could undoubtedly exercise great influence were her morals not so notoriously bad. She is passionately fond of dancing, has a musical voice, snapping black eyes and a beautiful set of teeth. She claims that she owes her wonderful preservation to a charm which an old half breed Indian doctor exercised over her when she was a child. She says she will neither grow old nor die until the charm is broken. Some of the natives express the belief that she is in league with the devil. She got into an altercation with a young woman not long ago and cut her seriously, but the latter was afraid to enter a complaint against her lest she should exercise some baleful influence over her. It is said that she has many admirers and is soon to be married to a young Chilian of considerable wealth.”