ODDS AND ENDS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 637, 24 January 1914, Page 6

ODDS AND ENDS.

So small is a model of the liner Medina on view at the recent "Model Engineer" Exhibition at the Royal Horticultural Hall, London, that human hair has been employed for eome of the ropes to keep them to a proportionate size. The authorities of Berlin suburb of Spandau have decided to tax perambulators. Every citizen who sends his child riding in one of these must pay a yearly tax of 1b 6d, This will entitle him to push it along the footpath. Four brothers, named Max, Herbert, Berthold, and Richard Klingenstein, attended a family gathering at Biel, Switzerland, wearing the French, German, Italian, and Swiss uniforms, having enlisted in the armies of the four respective nations. A wedding without a ring seema incongruous, but in some parts of Spain no ring is used. After the ceremony the bridegoom moves the flower in the bride's hair from left to right, for in those districts to wear a rose above your right ear is to proclaim youiself a wife. Perhaps the moU extraordinary tatooing ever carried out was that of a coachman who, at the time of the Dreyfus trial had his body and legs covered with no fewer than 120 illustrations of the case, including por traits of the leading personages. The work occupied nearly two years. Wollstein, a village near Cassel, in Prussia, has been abandoned by its inhabitants on the ground that life there is hopeless. The soil is sterile, and the authorities refused to link the village to the outer world by rail. Only one inhabitant remains, Frau Hoeft, a sheperdess, who is eighty years old, and declares that she will die in the village where she was born.

A Pennslyvania man who died recently was so stout that his house had to be demolished partially before it was possible to bury him. He weighed 5001b, and the coffin was so large that it could not be taken out by the door or through the windows, -o that part of the house had to be torn down first. On account of his size he had been unable to do any work for the past five years. The marriage has taken place at Baltimore of Miss Sophie M. Koerth, who was pronounied incurable by over a score of physicians and was operated on nine times. Four months ago, after the last and most dangerous of the operations, Miss Koerth felt for the first time that a cure had been effected. Miss Koerth was married in the dress which she made four years ago with hen own hands for her shroud.

Few crazes are more extraordinary than the American mania of "souvenir hunting." It is calculated that in London hotels alone the annua'' depredations amount to £20,000, mostly made up of articles of small intrinsic value, such as plates and spoons. Snobbery is said to be responsible as the re+urnjng tourist loves to display articles bearing the crest of celebrated hostelries. The worst of the Bouvenir fiends are the travellers who carry small axes to chip off pieces of statues and fragments of the masonry of cathedralß.

The famous peal of bells in the belfry at Brugeß is played on the principle of a musical box, with an enormous drum weighing 20001b. In the drum are 30,U00 holes for brass pegs which touch the trackers and move the wires communicating with the bell-hammers. The airs are changed once each year, but the drum mußt be wound up every two hours.