0 l*"&0_- OUB OOBBBs_______4X.) [Br Tkleobaph raose thb B_o__-1 MELBOUBNE, February 19. Angus McGinnis, a wood and ooal dealet at Collingwood, has committed suicide under very singular circumstances, in fact, through being worried to death by book agents, he took a dose of strychnine on Sunday morning last. The circum stances which are reported to the police as having led to the commisskm of the act are very extraordinary. Several mrvmfo ago it appeared two canvassers for the book entitled " Victoria and ite Metropolis, Past and Present," called on McGinnis, and obtained from him some par ticulars of his life. Three weeks ago the same agents brought hir. two handsome volumes of the worlc. and demanded £6 6s in payment. He refused to give it. stating that he never authorised tbem to send the books. They then told him that his biography was written in the second volume of the work, page 729, and read as follows :—"Mclnnes Angus Abbot-ford is a native of Invernes shire, Scotland, who was at school until the age of fourteen, and came out to Australia in 1864 by the ship Sultana. He went on to a station in Queensland for three years, after which he came to Victoria, and fol lowed farming in Goulburn Valley fox fifteen years with fairly good results. Eventually he came to Melbourne and bought a piece of land at the corner of Vere and St. Phillip streets, Abbofcsford, and erected premises and commenced what is now a flourishing business in the ooal and wood trade." i here are hundreds ol such biographies in the book, which other wise is of considerable literary merit and artistically finished; but it appears that subscribers were obtained by the fact of having these wretched biographical notioes inserted. After reading tho paragraph the canvassers told Mclnnes that its insertion was sufficient to obtain a verdict in any court of law, and that he would be mulcted in costs. Mclnnes, however, refused to pay, and worried a good deal over the affair. He even went so far aa to take to drink, and remarked that he did not like to be had in that way. The climax was reached on Saturday morning, when he received a lawyer's letter demanding payment, and threatening legal proceedings failing a satisfaction of the claim. 