GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2336, 1 October 1921, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

The United States mail service is training dogs to deliver letters from aeroplanes. Dogs descend 1,500 ft. by parachute, and, after landing, free themselves and hurry off to recognised depots with the mail pouches.

A message from Amiens states that a regular battle with pickaxes took place among workmen engaged in enlarging the Longeau railway station. French and Algerians fought against Spaniards and Portuguese. Many casualties were reported. A local fisherman has caught in West Bay, near Weymouth, an enormous porpoise weighing over -1001 b., and more than 7ft. in length. In its struggles il broke the net, and finally had to he speared. Porpoises had lately been scaring Ihe mackerel away.

A Hying swallow was liit and instantly killed by a cricket ball bowled by Mr George Davies, in a match between Oswestry Boys’ High School and Oswestry Post Office Officials, qn Oswestry cricket ground. The bird dropped to the around dead, and the ball rose in the air, and narrowly missed the batsman’s head.

There has been a stampede of maddened ponies before a “prairie lire” in the Wigan coalfield district. Numbering 250, they had been brought up from the Pemberton pits, and were grazing in fields. They took fright and bolted when a peattire broke out in an adjoining field. In a very few minutes the blaze spread to the pasture land, and a field of oats. Racing the flames, the terrified animals leaped hedges and enclosures, and rushed upon the golf links, where the players rescued them from danger. •