MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

Lyell Times and Central Buller Gazette, Volume VI, Issue 296, 23 October 1886, Page 4

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

Queen Victoria sent a laurel wreath for Liszt's tomb. Dr Youl, the Melbourne Coroner, has held 12,000 inquests. The Duke of Edinburgh has complete his forty-second year. The Anglican Bishopric of Melbourne is worth only £IBOO a year. Two and a-lialf millions of people have visited the Colonial Exhibition. Two little children were overtaken by the advancing tide a Dieppe and drowned. North Carolina, which ten years ago spent 48,000d0l per year on education, now spends 800,000dol. Nearly fifty tons of snails, which are called the " poor man's oyster," are daily consumed in Paris. Stonehenge is to be preserved from the depredations of excursionists and the burrowing of rabits. A Jew, described as small, ill-made, and ugly, has been arrested in Paris, charged with having six wives. The man who, in his tour round the world on a bicycle, was not allowed to pass through Afghanistan, is now in India. The front of a house fell with a crash into a street at Leeds in the dead of the night without waking some of the Bleeping inmates. Mr Morley, the philanthropist, is reported to have given away about £50,000 a year in religious and charitable purposes. Several deaths nave occurred in Dresden through eating honey, portions of which the bees had extracted from the deadlv nightshade. A mother wno ran to snatckup her child which had strayed on to the line near Wigan was caught dy a train, both being instantly killed. Mary Ann Britland, who poisoned her husband, daughter-in-law, and the wife of another man, to get the insurance money, was executed at Manchester on August 9th. The estate of the late Mr T* Walker, of Sydney, is valued at a million and a quarter. One hundred thousand pounds goes to the foundation of a convalescent hospital at Parramatta. Her Majesty has written expressing her sympathy with the inhabitants of Ferryden, a fishing village on the Forfarshire coast, which has suffered severely from an attack of typhoid fever. The late Mr James Bobarts, of Ipswich, amougst other things, bequeaths to his son " the case of in- ; struments taken from the carriage of .) Joseph Napolean Bonaparte at the Ljbattle of Vittoria." '. The Laplanders are estimated to be 350,000 in number and are gradually I,becoming fewer. The North American Indians are rapidly growing fewer, ; and the time is probably not far dist tant when they will entirely disappear * from the world. Girton College, Cambridge, is about * to come into possession of a bequest of about £19,000, from the estate of the late Miss J. C. Gamble, of Portland .Place, London. The money will be mainly applied to the extension of the college buildings. Among the many schools in Boston is one for instruction in carpentry, conducted by a young lady. She had twenty-five pupils throughout the past winter, composed of boys belonging to some of the leading families, and she goes out of town twice a week to instruct a class of seven. The suffering from the long drought in Western Texas is unprecedented, rain to any extent not having fallen in florae localities for 14 months. The «a&ie an starving. In many localities the settlers are selling their farms for mere trifles, and leaving for the East in abject poverty. A demonstration of children was held at Newcastle to celebrate the enrolment of 100,000 children in " Uncle Toby's Dicky Bird Society," instituted by the editor of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, for the promotion of kindness to animals. A medal commemorative of the occurrence was struck. An old man named Peter Doyle, who has kept a second-hand book shop for upwards of 25 years in Tenth street, Philadelphia, died suddenly of heart disease in the middle of July last. Since his death it has been discovered that nis real name was Sir Pieire Doyley, Bart., and he was the JiHeal descendant of an Anglo-Norman ffltmily. In the year 1812 a man named Williams, after murdering two whole families in East London, committeg suicide to escape execution, and was buried at the junction of the crossings in Cannon street road. During some excavations just made here the skeleton of Williams was discoverd, impaled on a stake as was the custom at the time in the case of murderers and suicides.