ENGLISH ITEMS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3122, 30 June 1881, Page 4

ENGLISH ITEMS.

The will of the late Czar Alexander 11. has been proved. The personalty consists of 48,000,000 roubles, lying to the credit of the Czar with some London bankers. Fortyeight millions is a large sum, especially in roubles, and it ia not an insignificant amount even in pounds sterling. The amount may be put, roundly, at £4,800,000. His late Majesty paid perhaps an unconscious compliment to the stability of the English order of things when he selected London bankers for taking care of his immense -wealth. It appears that at the close of the year 1880 there were in the United States 170,103 telegraphs, and during that year 33,155,991 messages were sent. The miles of wire were about 390,000. This doee not include the lines used exclusively for railroad business. The other countries having the greatest length of lines are as follow : — Russia, 56,170 .miles ; Germany, 41,431; France, 36,970 ; Austria-Hungary, 30,403 ; Australia, 26,842 ; Great Britain, 23,156 ; British India, 18,209; Turkey, 17,805 ; and Italy, 15,864. Lord Beaconsfield's brother (Mr Ralph Disraeli) ie the junior clerk of the House of Lords, and it has been stated that the late earl treated hie humbler relation with marked coolness. The fact is the very contrary. Lord Beaconsfield never lost an opportunity, no matter how crowded was the House or how brilliant the assembly, of letting the world know that he was not ashamed of his brother. Housed to leave the Treasury Bench, and, leaning over the chair at the table, would chat with him. He would walk out of the House of Lords arm-in-arm with him, and also enter it with him. Mr Ralph Disraeli is the only near relative left, but Lord Beaconsfield leaves a number of nieces and nephews by his mother's side. Nottinghamshire possesses a parish which must be nearly, if not quite, unique. It contains only one house, inhabited by one family (four brothers), who seem to comply with the forma required by parochial law. They appointed one of their number overseer, another parish constable, etc., and then made their own rate. Unluckily, they quarrelled lately; and fought with farming utensils, and the magistrates of Bingham have, in consequence, sent the parish of lodge-on-the-wolds to prison for two months. " Atlas," in the World, writes ;—" I hear that one of the most remarkable pictures in the coming Academy will be the portrait of two eisters by an eminent painter, and that the most noticeable features in the portrait will be the young ladjes , hair. It may interest some people to know that these flowing tresses owe their gloss and beauty to being washed in champagne (every morning. At the present price of good brands, this new tcilatte appliance must be rather costly. Bntjjerhaps after the wine has done its duty it is re-bottled, to be again nsed. " M. Gastaldoni, of Vincenza, Italy, has invented a new pianoforte, which can make the sound of eacli key last as long as the player wishes, just like a violin. And yet it is not- a violin, but a pianoforte. Liszt, Rubinstein, and. other great pianists say that quite a new era in pianoforte playing begins with this invention. A telegram form Pe3th reports a sensational discovery in that city. At a recent auction of unclaimed property left in the hands of the Danube "Navigation Company, a merchant bought two boxes' containing leaden pipes, one centimetre in thickness, rolled up m cotton. The total length of these pipes when joined together was about 1,000 metres. The purchaser took a small portion of one of them, some, three-quarters of a metre in length, as a specimen to Messrs Egger's Telegraph Works, and offered the whole of them for sale. M. Egger noticed within the pipe a piece of •white string, which aroused his suspicion, and he thereupon took it into the factory yard and set fire to it. A tremendous report followed. The governor of the city was immediately informed of what had occurred, and he instituted an examination, which ultimately showed that the leaden part of the pipe was merely a thin covering concealing a string saturated with nitroglycerine or some other dangerous explosive. The two boxes were, it appears, handed over to the Danube Navigation Company at Alt-Giadiska in 1879 to be conveyed to Neueatz, and they remained at the latter place until November of last year, when they were sent up to the central depot in Pesth to be disposed of as unclaimed property. ■ A strange discovery was made in the City the other day. While some men were engaged in forming a new drain on some premises in London Wall, a spade struck a tough, substance, which, on being examined, turned out .Ao be a large leather bag or trunk, containing 238 gold and silver coins, mostly of the reign of Charles I. There were also in the trunk several curious pieces of plate, among them being a reliquary containing hair, and a goblet of peculiar design. The whole are in good preservation, but the bag had almost rotted away. The Assize Court at Heilbronn, in Wurtemberg, had lately before it a case which, is probably unique in criminal annals. A day labourer, who was laid up with a broken leg, was charged with embezzlement, and was summoned to appear before the juge d , instruction. Overwhelmed with the disgrace, perhapa unable to exculpate himself, he ordered his son to hang him. The son, who also was a day labourer, acting up to the injunction " Obey your parents," earned him to the house loft, where he hung him effectively from one of the beams. The Court sentenced the son to imprisonment for three years and nine months. The most costly house in New York will be that of Mr Vanderbilt, who is only outdone in magnificence throughout the States by the Bonanza King in the Far West. We are told that the house, together with two others adjoining, which Mr Vanderbilt is constructing for his daughters, will cost some £?00,000. The woodwork is to be " chosen from the choice woods of the world," and is to be fashioned by the "most skilful European pnd American carvers." During the Railway King's recent visit to Paris he bought some almost priceless ceilings, and secured a replica of G-hiberti's famous gates of the Baptistery at Florence, the latter for £4,000. . "The King of the Vagrants" has just died in the Union at Sherborne, Dorsetshire, where he had been an inmate for about ten years. George Brine often boasted that he had been in every gaol and workhouse in England, and in a sketch of his life said he had never been convicted of felony or larceny. M. Raoul Pictefc, of Geneva, so well known for his discoveries of the liquefaction of gases, announces the discovery of a method of distilling alcohol by ice. Two kilogrammes of ice are needed for the production of a litre of alcohol; that is, for the distillation of 110 gallons of alcohol a little less than a ton of ice will be required. The cost of production will include only coal for working the steam engine which drives the air pump, and the sulphuric acid the evaporation of which produces the ice. M. Pictet declares that this will notably diminish the expense of distillation, and suggests that the excise on alcohol should be proportionally increased. Mr Froude's indiscretion in publishing Thomas Carlyle's rsminiscences has stopped subscriptions for the Carlyle Memorial. Tho Westminster Review suggests that the manuscript of the first volume of his " French Revolution " was not accidentally burned as alleged, but was deliberately destroyed through jealousy on tho part of John Stuart Mill or tho lady who afterwards became his wife. The Quarterly Review contains a slashing attack on Cai-lyle, believed to be from the pen of Edward Hayward. The writer condems those who seek to raise busts to men of genius whose works are in open defiance of good sense, good feeling, and good tasto. Gilbert and Sullivan's " new and testhetic opera," in two acte, entitled " Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride," was produced at the • Opera Comique, on 23rd April. The libretto, it ie itatod, oontains some 1ot» ballads of

poetic beauty. Mr Sullivan's mugio is not strikingly original. It has lots of " go," and some of the ballads are _ extremely pretty. A sextet at the conclusion of the first act, " I hear the soft note of the echoing voice of an old, old love Ion? dead," is exceedingly sweefc. Mr Sullivan has added a quantity of jingle, but ib must be admitted that Mr Gilbert's words demand thi3. There are some pretty dances and taking dance music, but altogether the music is rather disappointing. One scene of the opera, where the colonel, major, and lieutenant enter in aesthetic dress, one holding a sunflower, another a tulip, tho third a lily, and drill in sesthetic attitudes, as made popular by George Dα Maurier, is supremely funny. " Patience" was received with much enthusiasm and many recalls by '.Is audience, whoso feet frequently pattered to the jingle of the music and its rhymes.

The preliminary operations in connection with the boring of the proposed Channel have, says a home paper, been attended with the most gratifying results. No serious impediment has as yet presented itself, and although that part of the work which is likely to be fraught with the greatest amount of risk and difficulty has yet to be encountered, there appears to be no reason why the fondest hopes of tho speculators, despite predictions to the contrary, may not even now be realised, and the travelling portion of the public reap (he benefit of a scheme which to say the least of it, will remove the unpleasant sensations and the inconvenience which are so often experienced in a passage across " the silvery streak." Tho boring advances at the rate of about 25ft per day of ten hours, and has already been carried to a distance of above 300 yards. The idea is to continue until a depth of some 200 ft below the bed of the channel is reached. It is then confidently hoped by geologists that the character of the geological formations will admit of the engineering operations being advanced in a direct line of level, so as to allow of a corresponding rise on the other side of the channel. The operations are carried on under the direction of Colonel Beaumont, the chalk being cut with a disc furnished with cutters, which is worked by one of that gentleman's compressed air engines. '1 he disc makes two revolutions per minute, slicing off the chalk to the thickness of a quarter of'an inch at each revolution. There is no change in the soil, which is still grey chalk, and there is a remarkable freedom from the percolation of water.

" German ladies of good family," who arrive in England in scores, are seriously competing with English governesses. The English picture trade is principally in German hands. The ranks of labor are crowded with German woi'kmen. We have German architects and German professors of all kinds. German engineering firms compete successfully with ours. Their cheap contracts are frequently accepted in preference to those of English firms for works of considerable magnitude, as they not only bring ironwork from Germany, but German workmen as well. We have everything from Germany at the lowest possible figure, even to the humble German potato, which, it is asserted, rivals the Irish article in quality, as it does in cheapness. And yet we do not Boycott our Teutonic friends. On the contrary, we hold out our arms and receive them as brothers, though we stand in danger of being ruined by German cheap labor and German competition generally. These are surely facts which should make the subjects of the Kaiser be a little more tolerant of Israelitish competition.—London World.

For the first time within a period of nearly forty years it can be said of England, the Echo remarks, that she is practically at peace with the rest of the world. We have not, at this moment, even a threatened bombardment on hand. There ia not an Indian war, not even a colonial border conflict, in progress. This may, our contemporary goes on to say, appear very undignified and self-abdicating on the part of a great Empire, but ifc is certainly a new aspect of Imperial dominion which has been thus assumed. We are on friendly terms with all the independent Native potentates of India and of the regions beyond its borders ; we have come to an end, for a time at any rate, of our difficulties in South Africa ; and there is not so much as the shadow of a threatened complication between Great Britain and the Great Powers on the Continent. The opportunities of commerce, therefore, may be expected to take their turn. There are exhaustless markets in Central Asia, only to be reached through the gates of a friendly Afghanistan. There is the whole of Central Africa to be approached from the South, provided that we are on amicable terms with the intervening populations. But we can no more prosper with a jealous or suspicious neighbour than we can with a rebellious colony, and now that a sort of practical peace jubilee might be celebrated throughout the British Empire it may be as well to ask ourselves, what have been our recent gains from war ?