NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2371, 22 December 1921, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

The majority of Chinese women cannot read or write.

There are 11,000 telegraph messengers in the British Isles. Banjos, which originated in India, came to England from America. Cigars are becoming increasingly popular among women smokers. Switzerland is electrifying her railways, to save importing coal. Women to-day buy fifty per cent, more shoes than they ever did betfore.

Farming was the occupation of half the population of France before the war.

Farm carts fifty years of age and older are still in use on a farm in the Cotswolds.

Badges symbolic of their names are being supplied to many ships in. the British Navy. From tjje presses of the United ;

States flow 11,250,000,000 copies of daily newspapers annually.. Deaf, people are to have special churches in Germany, with telephones between the piflpit and the pews. New York State has an automobile to every 14 of its residents, and a licensed chauffeur to every three ears.

“Tramp” aeroplanes, costing about £20,000, and able to carry ten tons of merchandise, are being designed. Motor cars in the United States were responsible for 12,000 deaths, and property damage of £200,000,000 in 192 o!

Belgium will establish a National School of Hotel Management in Brussels. The school takes the form of a, model hotel. Materials of all kinds, sold by the yard, may now be accurately measured by a small machine which also shows on a second- dial the price payable. • Several interesting Maori curios have been recovered by the men employed on the Priestman dredge in the Waitoa. River at Among them are a beautiful stone axe, a neatly finished staff, pointed sticks, and a number of muhgimungi eel hets. /All the articles are in a good state of preservation. The eel nets were particularly well made, and Maoris who have seen them state that they could not be made nowadays. The nets have uniform meshes of half an inch by a quarter of an inch.

A Banffshire fisherman, William Coull, widower, of Portgordon, dreamt that a train ran over him, and that he was cut to pieces. He told the dream to his hohsekeeper, and late that night the dream came true. While taking a short cut along the railway, a passenger train knocked him down, and the manner of his death, as he dreamt it, was fulfilled.

“Egg-pulp will keep for a lengthy period when placed in a freezing chamber,” said counsel in a case in the Wellington Supreme Court, “but when exposed to the air it will not remain in good condition for more than eight days.”