MISCELLANEOUS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 739, 16 June 1876, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

- o A Doughmestic Difficulty.—Heavy bread, Is there any law against striking an attitude?

Hush Money,—The money paid a baby’s nurse.

At one of our recent Christmas celebrations one of the wax candles on the Christmas-tree was leaning slightly. A little boy, fresh from his geography, remarked “that it resembled the tower of Pisa.” “ Yes,” said another, “ except that one is a tower in Italy, and the other a tower in grease." Leo Lespes, the brilliant French writer, who died recently, tells why the fashionable seldom or never go on foot. The custom was introduced, says ‘ Charivari,’ by Count d’Alton Shee, and had the following origin. One day he was walking in Paris with a young iady, who suddenly said, “ Oh, what a charming bracelet 1 Look there, my friend.’ So he bought it. A little further on she saw a fan. 1 Ah, what a lovely fan !’ quoth she. He bought. A little farther on she saw an ebony casket. ‘ Ah, what a casket!’ said she. ‘ I’ve wanted just such a one ever so long!’ How could he help buying it ? The next day the Count said to himselt, ‘ I will always take a cabriolet; it will not cost so much as walking.” Mr Darwin, in his “Naturalist’s Voyage,” describes a crab which makes its meal of cocoa nuts, and which he found on Keeling Island, in the South Seas : “It is very common on all parts of this drv land, and grows to a monstrous size. It has a front pair of legs, terminated by strong a*-d heavy pincers, and the least pair by others which are narrow and weak. It would at first be thought quite impossible for a crab to open a strong cocoa-nut covered with the husk, but M. Liesk assures me that he has repeatedly seen the operation effected. The crab begins by tearing the husk, fibre by fibre, and always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated ; when this is completed the crab begins hammering with its heavy claws on one of these eye holes till an opening is made, then turning round its body by the aid of its posterior and narrow pincers, it extracts the white albuminous substance. I think this is as curious a case of instinct as ever I heard of, and also of adaptation in structure between two objects apparently so remote from each other in the scheme of nature as a crab and a cocoa-nut."

In the days of our fathers, when a man suddenly dropped out of the community, they used to drag the neighbo-ing ponds and examine all available hanging places. Nowadays they examine his bank account. It’s merely changing his place of deposit. * An Irish car-driver, being desirous of excusing the stubbomess of his quadruped, remarked, “Hehasquare ways, yer anner. what wud ye think of a baste that wud do the likes av this? Won day he swallicd ha'f a soverin, an' all we could get him to give up was sivin-an’-six, all through conthrariness.”

Gymnasts in England and America perform incredible feats now-a-days. The three brothers Wilson were lately exhibiting in Chicago their unparalleled demon’s leap. One brother stood on another’s shoulders. The third then took a flying leap an a trapese from one side of tho theatre to the other, alighting on a ledge off which he immediately turned aback somersault and fell on his feet upon the shoulders of the topmost of thetwo standing on the stage. Only a gymnast can understand the extraordinary difficulty of this. Signor Gonzn, of Paris; advertises that he will drop any distance from the roof of a theatre through a trapdoor in the floor, and bound up again to a high trapese, by means of his new spring apparatus, on the same principle as that introduced in London recently by Lulu, tho Flying Lady.