AN INTERESTING CORRESPONDENCE
A case was brought before Judge Shepheard yesterday afternoon, on preliminary examination, which involved some nice points, and also enriched the polite literature of the country with what Mr. Cook, counsel for one of the parties, termed "foreign correspondence" - a number of epistolary communications, equal to the productions of Madame de Sevigne or the Countess of Blessington. One of the questions presented was, whether a Chinaman's wife is his'n or your'n if you want her. Ah Chung had a friend who had a wife; friend was in the mountains, wife in this city, and Ah Chung in Shasta. Ah Chung visited the city, and delivered to his friend's wife what purported to be a letter from her husband, directing her to pack up her trunks and go to him, the messenger to be her escort. She packed up, and Ah Chung took her to Shasta for his own use. She found herself betrayed, and indurance. A female friend of her own nation sympathized with her, and wrote a letter, informing a friend of the distressed captive in this city of Ah Chung's infamy - Bulwer Lytton couldn't have done it more eloquently - stating that the perfidious Ah Chung claimed the woman as his property, and asked two hundred dollars to redeem her. A correspondence on the subject followed, resulting in the liberation of the abducted victim; though without her baggage, which had been confiscated by the avaricious Ah Chung. The denouement was Ah Chung's being held yesterday, by Judge Shepheard, in the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, to answer in the County Court to a charge of grand larceny. The letters, which were written, of course, in Chinese characters, were translated by Mr. Charles Carvalto, and afforded an interesting specimen of sentiment and condolence as expressed by they of the Flowery Kingdom.
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