GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 1992, 19 June 1919, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

A New Plymouth resident, tired of being pushed out of rented houses, recently purchased a sevenroomed house of his own, and promptly gave notice to his tenant to quit. But the tenant was an y exsoldier, and would not budge. The owner suggested that the tenant could stay on and occupy three of the rooms, he using the other four. But the ex-soldier, secure in his position, was adamant. The owner approached the Repatriation Committee with a view to securing its good offices, but as the committee exists to help returned soldiers, it could only suggest to the irate owner that he persevere in the eexrciso of moral suasion, the only force which he could legally use.

Professor Willot, who has died at Roubaix, for three years, during the German occupation of Northern Prance, clandestinely printed q newspaper called Patience. He obtained news by secret wireless installations, which intercepted messages from Eiffel Tower, and published supplements, giving extracts from the French and English papers. Patience was first duplicated in a cellar, and then printed. The paper changed its name several times to outwit the Germans. Professor Willot and his wife were finally denounced and arrested. The Professor was tried, sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, and taken to a German prison, where bis health was undermined by his privations.

A romantic war story, which is known to be true, has come to the knowledge of the Acting-Defence Minister of Australia. The conduct of a young married Englishman led to his wife separating from him, and, regarded as a hopeless “waster,” he went to Australia, enlisting in the Australian forces at the beginning of the war. Ho received his commission in France, and was seriously wounded. He woke to consciousness to find that his nurse in the clearing station, where he was retained owing to being in too serious a condition for further transport, was his wife, avJio had undertaken nursing work. The fact that the “waster” had made good, and the loving kindness of his nurse, removed the estrangement, and the couple are now happily united.

“Next to (lie Seolch, the Japanese avo the notion most passionately fond of education in the world/’ said Professor J. Macmillan Brown, at the meeting' of the Royal Colonial Institute in Christchurch, states the Press. “That fact makes the Eastern menace all the greater, because a well-educated country, the Germans have shown us, has the most capacity for making it warm for its enemies. ” However, Professor Macmillan Brown holds no brief for one trait of the Japanese character, their utter lack of honesty. He had heard, he said, of a schoolmaster who had bought a stock of Japanese pencils, only to find that there was about an eighth of an inch of lead at each end of each pencil, and the rest was wood, (Laughter). It was one of the safeguards the Western nations had against Japan, one of the greatest protections ngainst the threat of the East, that the Japanese could not make their markets thoroughly honest.