Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-11-07

Had she gone abroaado At the steamship agencies
faded and yellow envelops bearing date of 1886
opened and passenger lists examined. Search was
made of the records of the morgue for the month
following the disappearance; but nameless corpse
answering her description had been given up by the
rivers the bay At the hospitals were found the
records of many unknowns who had met with acct
dent in the streets and had died frendless and alone
but the age and personnel of Mary Bates fitted none
of these.
THEN suddenly came the thought that the old
lady might still be living at the age of ninety
four But where? Perhaps in asylum aims
house. There was chance in thousand yes, one
chance in four thousand according to the tables of
the census; for there were fOrtyone hundred living
Pc sons in the country of the age of ninety four
In a wing at the amshouse on Blackwe'ls Island
was found colony of poor old souls, enjoying the
maidens six hundred and sixty of them, decrept,
aged, careworn, feeble in mind and feeble in body,
thin and gaunt and haggard old danes, sequestered
here to end their days routine and Renaissance,
neglected and forgotten by the great city the
murky waters of the river.
search was made among the derelicts, these poor
old hulkS that once with grace and beauty had
sailed the of life. And some of them were very
old, more than ninety-four. At least two of them
had seen full hundred years Where face or a fig
seemed to warrant inquiry, her number
taken and her brief history found the Office
books. Most of them had Names but
designated merely Jane Doe, or Crazy Mag.
Its hard game for the old DANES said the reg
istry clerk in confidence. They keep a-comn and
agoin. Two die every day, and three ones comes
we're gettin' more and more cramped for room every
year..
TT was the next day that Fox was telling the lawyer
about the finding of Mary Bates
They called her Aunt Mary said the young
man. She was down on the books as Mary Blank.
l found her huddled up in wooden
bench grooming and rubbing her wrnkled hands.
Her voice like that of child, and only at inter-
walls did she appear to show intelligence. But in
these intervals | managed to obtain sufficient in
formation to establish her identity. When | men,
toned Park-ave she became angry and insisted it
Clark-ave. where she had lived. And this morn
ing found that she right. The savings bank
people had mistaken Park for Clark in noting where
she lived.
The records show" continued Fox THAT she
found in the street one night in April, 1886, in
said her name was simply Mary and so in the course
of the usual order of things the Charities got
her and then she was sent to the island. Her
memory is gone absolutely; but she managed to
tell me that her fathers name was John and that
she had named Joe living in Newark. I'm not
going to lose any time in finding Joe because the old
lady is very feeble practically on her last legs. and
she is likely to drop out almost any day.
Over in Newark, at the end of a two days search,
Joseph Bates found on out of the way street.
He told rather an odd story about himself and his
mother. She was very miserly, he said and had pre-
ferred to live alone in her two rooms Clark
He would drop over and see her twice year.
She had, he believed, saved few hundred dollars
for rainy day; for whenever he had offered her
money she had refused it, telling him to go about
his business that she quite able to take care of
herself. In 1888 he went to Brazil contract to
help build an American brewing plant and he had
liked the country down there and stayed and on
expecting to return every year. He had written
peatedly to his mother; but there response
to his letters and he had long since given her up as
dead. He had returned to New York in 1901 and
strange to say went back to Newark again and
went to live on the street where he formerly
boarded. He had made an effort to find some trace
of his mother on Clarkave a record of her death;
but had found the task hopeless one.