MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Volume I, Issue 40, 16 September 1863, Page 6

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS.

A Baby Pie ! —Sir R. G. M'Donnell, in his recent lecture on South Australia, astonished his fair hearers at Dublin, by stating that a party of South Australian settlers having killed an *' old man," made excellent soup of his tail! The following extract from Mrs. Atkinson's Travels in Lapland and Siberia, will probably be useful to Sir R. G. M'Donnell the next time he lectures on foreign cookery. Mrs. Atkinson says that a singular practice is known amongst the Siberians under the name of " Baby Pie." She had a little son, named Alatan, who was born at the foot of a mountain so called. One day when he was about two months old, he was very restless, and a peasant woman proposed he should be baked. " Baked!" I shrieked. "Yes." Explanations were entered into, when I learned it was quite a common custom to do so, but if I did not like to have him placed in an oven I could cover him with a crust and place him on the hot stove, when hairs would come out on his back; these plucked out the child would be perfectly easy. I mentioned this circumstauce to a friend in this town, who tells me it is quite true that Siberian peasants bake their children. There is a particular disease they have it is said, which can only be removed by baking. A crust is made of rye flour, when the child is enclosed Within it, in the same way as a fowl in a pasty, leaving a small aperture for the child to breathe through ; then it is placed in the oven with its door closed, but only a few seconds, and it is said that it ptoves a sure remedy.—Geelong Advertiser.

A Singular Challenge to War.—The last mail from Alexandria brought the text of a curious document, being a formal declaration of war by the King of Abyssinia against Said Pasha, the late Viceroy of Egypt. His Abyssinian Majesty says:—" You do not make war like a brave man ; you hide yourself behind walls ; you kiil your enemies with cannon. Come into the country with your army; there, breast to breast, let valor and courage decide the fate of battle. It was thus our ancestors used to fight." In answer to this letter, which did not arrive till after Said Pasha's death, his successor has sent several thousand Bashi Bazouks, with orders to repel King Theodore's troops if they cross the frontier, but not to pursue them on the Abyssinian territory.

" A rather ignorant and very hasty criticism." says the Spectator, " has been passed upon the address, received this week from the New Zealand House of Representatives, in reply to the proposal of the Duke of Newcastle to put affairs under the authority of the colonial legislature and then throw on the colonists the chiet expense of the military system required to deal with the Maoris. The truth is that 110 proposal could be more unjvstly timed. The military conduct of the recent war in New Zeiland was disgraceful beyond the disgrace of ordinary blundering. The campaign was in no way controlled or even influenced by any appointee of the responsible government, but was mismanaged by men appointed frcin horn?, and irremovable in the islands. It has taxed the whole colonv £5 a head—has demanded the services of all the grown-up males of the province of laranaki, and yet was so concluded as to leave the natives far more dictatorial, presumptuous, and self-con-fident than ever. Turanaki is still in a state of sice, and the war threatens to break out again at any moment. In such circumstances, it is certainly not unreasonable for the settlers to decline to assume for the first time a military responsibility which is the net result ot the absolute incompetence of the administration of Colonel Gold and his colleagues."

Mr. Whiteside, in a lecture delivered at Dublin, on the history of the Irish Parliament, Sir Robert Peel being one of his audience, is reported to have charmed the Repealers and ,4 Nationalist V' hy enunciating the nmiui,*'' Irelmd first, aud everything else afterwards."—Home News.