SCISSORS.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 2, Issue 168, 26 February 1878, Page 3

SCISSORS.

A pleasant bit of scandal is being circulated in London, which affords an interesting proof of the extent to which the spirit of trade has infected even "our old nobility." A certain noble lord, who has not yet seen his thirty-fifth year, is well known as an enthusiastic china-maniac ; but it has only been recently discovered that there is something more than the virtuoso in his enthusiasm for bric-a-brac. Regularly once a month his lordship scours all the old curiosity shops of London, and purchases every scrap of unique and and valuable china he can lay his hands upon. He makes capital bargains, and then sends his purchases to a snug little shop in a fashonable West End street. This done, he goes the rounds of all his friends and acquaintances whom he knows to be bitten with the chinamania, and talks of the wonderful treasures he has just seen in that little shop, gives the dealer an excellent character for honesty, and having excited the curiosity of the china-maniacs takes his departure. There immediately follows a run upon the little shop, and the morcexmx are snapped up at fancy prices. But hitherto no one has suspected that the young virtuoso had any interest in this little shop—beyond that of a collector. Now, however, it is whispered that the noble lord is himself the owner of the shop, and that he makes a very handsome profit out of it. A Dutchman's defence upon an indictment for bigamy is now going the rounds of the papars. We do not know whether it is a new story, but certainly it is a very ingenious defence. " You say," said the Judge, " that the squire who married you to the first wife authorised you to take sixteen ? What do aou mean by that?" " Well," said Hans, "he told me that I should haf four petter, four vorser, four richer, four boorer —ant in my coundry/ow dimes four olways make sixteen."— Wild Oats.