GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2360, 26 November 1921, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

.A live grass snake three feet long was found by a Broxbourne railway porter on the floor of a third-class carriage. He killed the reptile with a shunting pole. The snake- is believed to have crawled into the carriage when the train was in a siding in the country.

.“His death was due .to shock caused by persistent sea-sickness,” said Dr. Johnson, at an inquest at Hull on Frank Dalton, aged sixteen. Dalton went for a trip in a trawler; to the North Sea fishing grounds, and was sea-sick. The skipper became anxious about the lad and brought the vessel home, but Dalton died on the way back. An extraordinary occurrence is reported from Jandols, Simla, where the water in the river suddenly disappeared underground. Other water was only to be obtained at a spot two miles distant. A convoy for watering animals was carried out with great difficulty. Three days later the water reappeared in the old channel.

A French seaman named Lancol-le-Poneche, who can neither read or write, has just come into a windfall of £1,500,000, left him by an uncle who went to the Argentine as a penniless youth and subsequently amassed a fortune. The seaman, who lias sailed all over the world, arrived recently at Dunkirk to obtain work in another ship. His sister, who resides at Marseilles, inherits an equal sum by the same will. Lizzie Thomas, of Pwllheli, had an exciting adventure with weasels when returning home from school. She saw a solitary weasel on the road, and struck it with a stone. The animal uttered a loud cry, and at once six more weasels issued from a hole and began to attack the girl. A farmer came on the scene, and with the help of his dog drove the weasels back to their retreat.

Thirty persons, trapped on the fifth floor of a burning New York tenement house, were piloted to safety offer a poor housewife’s thin ironing-board, six inches wide at one end and nine inches at the other, which was held on the edges of two roofs. A paralytic woman of seventy was pushed over by firemen, who also sent up two walls of water to keep rescued and rescuers from choking with smoke and the flames from destroying their precarious bridge.

The woman named Olive Champion, of Wrexham, who was found wandering on the seashore til Eastbourne after she bad been knocked down by a motor car, told the police a romantic story which had a remarkable sequel. She said that she had wandered the countryside for four years in search of her brother, who is a travelling knife-grinder. The brother entered the town two days after the accident by the same road, and bearing of the accident, made inquiries, with the result Hint brother and sister were reunited in the infirmary.

Counterfeit paper money has been current in Berlin for the last six months, and now the police lia\( discovered the forger’s plant in the study of a philosopher named Franz Wydrinski. Wydrinski is the author of a large number of learned works, including <( A Systematisation of all Philosophical Concepts,” and pamphlets on a new numerical system, the foundations of language, and various chemical discoveries of his own. When the police arrested him lie insisted on reading aloud paragraphs from his philosophy, and pleaded that he turned counterfeiter merely in order to he able to publish his writings for the benefit of the public. A tombstone erected on her father’s grave, to the memory of another man'who died a quarter of a century affer him. Such was the surprising discovery made by the daughter of Mr 11. P. Edmondson, a former resident of Matlock Bath, when she visited the parish ehuioilyard during a short stay in the town. Mr Edmondson died in 1885. The stone on the grave commemorates a local councillor who was buried ten years ago. Complaint was made liv the daughter to the church authorities, who have sanctioned the removal of Mr Edmondson’s remains to another grave. This, however, is likely to he a matter of some difficulty.