GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2362, 1 December 1921, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Workmen cleaning the beautiful east window of St. Catherine Cree Chuych, which was damaged in an air raid in 1917, discovered an inscription which read: “Thomas Jordan cleaned this windof, and damn ditto, 1918.” The present workers the job. 1815. Albert Trueman, ditto, 1918.” The present workers admitted also that cleaning the window was a troublesome task. First cousins, and sweethearts when children, Mrs Annie Webb, of Itchen, Hampshire, and Mr Archibald Hedges, retired wine and spirit merchant, of Wiltshire, were married at Pear Tree Church, Southampton, recently, both aged 65. In each case it was a third marriage. Four of the bride’s five children were present at the ceremony, by which the bride resumed her maiden name and returned to her birth-place. British hospitals are soon to receive a loan of radium, the precious curative mineral. This is promised through the formation of an Anglo-Czecho-Slovakian company, which has secured three mines from .the Czeeho-Slovakian Government. Two grains, valued at £70,000, will he available from the mines at Gncliomoy very shortly. Other radium extracts will he sold for medical purposes, while radium earth, an important fertiliser, will he disposed of to farmers and nurserymen.

Gagasse, the cane sugar stalk from which the juice has been extracted, is being made into building material .by a manufacturing company at Marero, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. It is said to he virtually a substitute for lumber. The product is being manufactured in hoards 12 feet wide and 800 feet long, one hoard containing enough material to build three bungalows. Strips are later cut into required dimensions. A united campaign against motion pictures, dancing, immodest undress, mixed.hatliimr divorce, Sunday baseball, gambling and violation of the prohibition laws was began by the thirty-three churches of the Elkhorn Baptist Association, Ken lucky, on Sundny, Oelohov 2nd. A unanimous vole t<> nuiko n united effort against all forms of worldliness was recorded. The association is composed of churches in six Kentuekv counties.

Forty barrels of fine elderberry wine proved to he the only ellective lire extinguisher early one morning, when a lire, on the farm of Gilbert Beetem, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, destroyed a barn and outbuildings valued at £2,000. The flames started to ignite a handsome lodge on the farm, and the water on the premises had run out. A thoughtful tenant remembered a large quantity of wine stored in the cellar, and within a few minutes the bucket brigade was transferring elderberry wine to the roof of the threatened building. A steady stream of wine was kept on the building until forty barrels were exhausted.

A cat belonging to a switch tender on a railroad between Vintimile mid S.ovone, just over the Italian border from France, recently prevented a catastrophe which might have cost scores of lives. A southbound express train, going 40 miles an hour, which a high speed for Italian trains, was stopped a few yards from a switch which had been li ft open, leading to a track on which a fast freight was to pass five minutes later. The engineer, noticing the semaphore showed the track dear, investigated and found the switctitender’s cat crushed between the switch points, preventing the proper functioning of the second signal. The switch-tender himself', with Italian volubility, insisted that the eat had foreseen the danger and sacrificed herself, an explanation which won 100 lire for the burial of the animal.