GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2348, 29 October 1921, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

A wedding ring lost 23. years ago has come once more into the possession of its owner, a woman of 82, under curious circumstances. While working among her potatoes in 1898, Mrs Charles Shorter, of Chobham, Surrey, missed the ring. Lately one of her grandchildren, digging potatoes in the same garden, came across one of unusual appearance. Around it was the ring, slightly bent, but otherwise uninjured. An act of chapel discipline led to the appearance at Aberavon Police Court of Jenkin Thomas, summoned for assaulting John Morris, a deacon, at Nebo Congregational Church. The prosecution said Thomas was expelled last January, but persisted in attending church meetings, which were for communicants only. Morris proclaimed him a trespasser on August 14th.

Directions that his body be cremated within 24 hours of death, and the ashes thrown to the winds, were given in the will of Mr B. Solomon Thompson, a well-known commission agent, of London, who left £19,853. He also directed that the funeral .be as simple as possible, without any religious ceremony, and that the plain gold ring belonging to his mother should be on his finger when his body was cremated.

“A very foolish thing indeed, to give an apple to a little baby,” said the Willesden coroner in recording a verdict of accidental death on an infant of 18 months old. Apples were not suitable food for babies, he said, and it was time parents realised it. It appeared that the child was taken out to tea by its mother, and its aunt gave it half an apple. The baby began to choke, and died, in hospital of suffocation. A game of “robbers and police ended in a tragedy in the Hungarian village of Sinnersdorf. After a “trial,” the boy who played the robber was found guilty by a jury of his playmates, and sentenced to death. A rope was fastened round his neck, and he was pulled up on the branch of a tree. Then the comedy became a tragedy. The boy’s face began to turn purple, and his schoolfellows ran away panic-stricken, leaving him to die. It is claimed that two Great Western trains from Bristol are, for a. long run, the fastest in the world. They are timed to travel the 90.9 miles between Badminton and Southall in 87 minutes, an average speed of 62.7 miles per hour. Over a portion of this distance —the section between Badminton and Woot-on-Bassett—the afternoon • train leaving Bristol at 5 o’clock is timed to cover 17 miles in 13 minutes, an average speed of 78.5 miles per hour. The 11.15 morning train from Paddington to Bristol covers the 118. 3miles in 128 minutes.