NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2136, 5 June 1920, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Miss Jennie Fash, placed on the pension list: at the age of 70 by the New York hoard of education alter 52 years’ continuous service as a teacher in one school in the Bronx, has taught 40,0ff0 children, including three generations of at. least one family.

The most costly of all kinds or sill; hosiery is made from silk which is not the product of the silkworm, hut a species of shellfish (allied a puina. It has an odd little tube at the* end of its tongue. Out of this t'die, spider fashion, or silkworm fashion, it spins a silk thread with which it fastens itself to any rock to which it fishes to adhere. Alien the puina moves on to fresh feeding grounds its silken cable is left behind. This cable, which is called ‘hyssiis, the Sicilian fishermen gather. Byssus weaves ihto the softest, finest, sheeniest of fabrics; but it is very rare.

Raphael's pictures seem to be peculiarly ill-fated. Only a few years .ago his “La Belle Pardiniore” was picked up at a second-hand shop in Paris for forty-four francs. His Vatican “Adam and Eve” was found Hung aside in the corner of a picture-dealer's shop in the Rue St. Lazare, by an artist who paid a hundred francs for it, and sold it a few days later for eighty thousand; and fop a modest fifty centimes a Parisian art-amateur purchased Raphael’s original design for his great picture, “La-Disputa del Sacramento,” for which he would willingly. have paid twenty thousand times as much.

The colossal statue of Himleubprg,,idolised by the public of Berlin. which was encouraged to di'ive nails, into it, at a price, in support of war charities, has been sold to America for exhibition purposes. Gerjuau monarchist circles are horrified at this prospect of such an ignominious end to the wooden Hin-

deuburg, and questions have been addressed to the Government as to the “measures which it proposes to take to protect, this symbol of agreat German epoch.”

Less than a century ago wives were offered by auction to the highest bidder in public places in different parts of England. Prices ranged upwards from Is. Twenty shillings .appears to have been considered a good price. There was the case of ii Midland farmer who parted with his wife for 20s and* a dog. The principal source of the amber supply is the-coast of the Baltic Sea, more particularly in the vicinity of Konigsherg. At this place amber, which is really a mineralised ,rosin of extinct pine-trees, is freely washed up by the sea, especially after a violent storm. The fishermen use nets with which they trawl the shallow waters.

In railway speed the Lake Shore Flyer did 100 miles an hour; the Twentieth Century Express from New York to Chicago covered 481 miles in 400 minutes. The Great Western has done from Paddington to Plymouth, which is 240 miles, in 275 minutes. British railways have, however, never maintained their utin Oregan, U.S.A., hay is loaded and packed into freight cars by means of an.air blast. The hay is drawn up to a deck beside the car by a crane, and a powerful airblower hurls it into Iho car, pressing it down and packing it.