NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 16 January 1901, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Some interesting facts in relation to the distribution of Bibles came out at the meeting af the British and Foreign Bible Society in London. The society costs £644 a day, and distributes over fire million copies of the Scriptures in a year, while since its foundation in 1804 over IGo million copies in 373 different languages, have been distributed, ilic ucll known evangelist, Mr Saukey, who has just completed a tour in Scotland and Ireland, said that whenever the late Mr Moody passed ihe society s house in Queen Victoria Street, London, he always took off his hat.

The new Imperial Act designed to check the avarice of usurers has now come before it was required. A puoilyclad woman of the working class applied the other day for advice to the Magistrate at the South-West London police-court. She said she borrowed £2 some time ago, and in order that her husband should not know about it, she agreed to pay the lender 8s a week as interest until the original loan was repaid. She had piud already £lB 6s in interest, and the lender was now threatening to tell her husband if she did not keep up her paymonks. Over 1,000 per cent interest. And the lender, it transpired, was a neighbour and friend of the borrower. As Gay says in one of his tables : An open foe may prove a curse, But a pretended friend is worse. It lias transpired that there was at least one Boer who had a conscientious objection to fighting against the British, and he took every precaution to avoid being commandeered, lie lived at Bloemfontein, and four times managed to-es-cape his legal duties as a burgher. Ihe first time he was called on to join jus commando and proceed on active service he bought himself off by giving bis two best horses in his stead ; the second tunc cost him the remainder of liis horses ; the third time he had to give up the entire stock and stoves of his house; and the fourth time, being determined not to take an active part against his friends, he got his son to shoot him in the leg. The pistol kicked and the bullet only just missed an extremely dangerous region. There Dr. A. Fripp found it, and for giving the opinion that the patient had better not undergo an operation to have it .extracted the wily old Boer gave lum the flag which he brought home to England a week or two ago.