MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

Lyell Times and Central Buller Gazette, Volume VI, Issue 275, 29 May 1886, Page 4

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

London supports 67 hospitals.

Paris, in all its business streets, melts the snow with salt and sweeps it into the sewers. The German Government has ordered 30,000 swords for the army. Seven German generals will complete their fiftieth year of active service during 1886. New York city is growing at a tremendous rate. More new houses were projected during the last three months than ever before in the history of that city. For having robbed a priest and resisted the police, a military tribunal in Kussia has condemned three Jewish brigands to death, and sentenced three others to fifteen years imprisonment. Canon Farrar has done so well in America that he has some thoughts of going on a lecturing tour to Australia. An American paper vilely says he will likely go Farrar and fare worse.

A labor bureau, under the auspices of the Imperial Government, has been opened in London to aid in sending to the Colonies some of the surplus working population of the Mother Country. An English paper says that a married couple wrote to the Coventry Guardians wishing to adopt a workhouse infant, and the Guardians were speedily deluged with letters from persons wishing to dispose of babies. At a baby show in Paris, an infant was exhibited three and a-half years old, born near Dieppe, which weighed 861b., and was 3 feet 10 inches in height. He is possessed of great strength, and promises to be a giant like his grandfather, although his father is of rather less than ordinary stature.

Alongside the main Mersey tunnel a smaller one, seven feet in diameter, is carried. This exists solely for the sake of ventilating the larger one, and out of it the air is sucked by exhaust fans with such force that it is said the whole body of the atmosphere is changed every seven minutes. Mr Ward Beecher, who, it appears, has been pestered by people to get them situations in the United States Navy Yard, has declared that "the reputation for influence is a curse." This profound knowledge, it should be observed, arrives, as a rule, to men only when they have got nearly all they want for themselves. A correspondent says he went into a bootmaker's shop on the Paris Boulevards to complain of the bad fit of a pair of boots, when the following dialogue ensued :—" Look here ; these boots are doing an injury to my feet." " Take them off, please, and let me see them,'* Then the artist took one boot, and, knitting his brows, said:

" It is not the boots which have done you any harm; it is your feet which have spoilt the boots." A general fight took place a few days ago at St. Denis, France, among a number of Italian workmen. Knives were drawn and freely used, with the result that one of the number was murdered and some others wounded. Two of the men have been arrested. President Cleveland denies that he has the marvellous memory his flatterers have ascribed to him. He says his memory is very capricious, often retaining trifling details regarding some cross-roads post-office, while letting slip matters of the first importance. The ups and downs of Colonial life were exemplified in the case of Captain Steele, a Colonist of nearly sixty years' standing, who died at Port Macquarie recently in a state of destitution. At one time he was one of the wealthiest squatters in New South Wales. Senator "Joe" Brown, of Georgia, is said to have the most complete collection of newspaper clippings in Washington, all relating to himself. He depends upon his wife to gather them for him. She keeps two scrapbooks, one for the good things and one for the bad things that are said about her husband. In Persia the possession of one or more slaves is the sign of respectability. " He must be respectable ; he owns a slave," is said in Persia. Slaves in that country are luxuries. Except in the establishments of the wealthy, not more than one or two negresses are kept; and the possession of a male slave means the same thing as keeping a man-servant in England.