GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2380, 17 January 1922, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS

f A Spanish Army orderly going to an outpost on a mule stopped three miles from Tangier to drink from a well. He dropped his rifle, and a Moor rushed up, picked it up, and fired at the soldier twice. He tried to fire again, but could not. The soldier picked up a stone and threw it with such force that he smashed in the Moor’s head. The Moor was bound and brought to the Spanish Legation. Two sons, aged 12 and 15, of a French farmer named Favre, were out with a flock of their father’s sheep, when they fell into a lake and were drowned. The sheepdog that

had been with them reached home with scarcely enough breath left to whine, but showed by its manner that some accident had happened, and led a party to the lakeside, where, by the time they arrived, the body of the younger child had been washed up on the shore. On a September evening two armed men appeared at an inn near Paris, and “held up” the innkeeper. His wife, in an adjoining room, tried to telephone to the police, and the bandits fled. Three days later, after two failures, the innkeeper got an interview with the local police commissary. Having heard his story, the commisary said, “Describe the men.” The innkeeper, who had been looking intently at the official, hesitated, and then said: “Well, one of them had your eyes, your neck and your appearance.” The commissary jumped up. “I don’t like that sort of joke,” he said, and the interview ended. According to a Paris newspaper, the official has now been arrested.

The Emir of Ivafsina, ruling prince of half a million Nigerians, and members of his party, paid a visit to the Natural. History Museum, South Kensington, S.W., a few weeks ago. The object of the visit was primarily to inspect the whales. Until he saw whales for the first time off the coast of Portugal, a short time before, the Emir had believed that there was only one whale iii the world, and that its evolutions were responsible for the rise and fall of tides in all the seas and oceans. At the door of the whale room the party stood aghast. “If those great fish leapt out of the water,” exclaimed the Emir, “wlml a splash they would make when they fell back!” When the whale’s tiny throat was explained to him, he commented: “Allah is indeed good for endowing it with so small a throat!” A large model of a Ilea interested the party. One of the retinue transfixed it with a heavy scowl, and remarked to a comrade: “There is the son of a dog that keeps us awake at night in Kntsina!” It seems not improbable that the sea near the Dogger Bank is rich and lively with that unexpected fish the floating golf ball. That is the inference from a curious find announced by Mr Newmark in a letter to the Field. A boatman on the coast of Jutland showed him a bag of 250 golf balls that he had picked up on the shore in winter. Now the waters tha t enter the North Sea round Ihe North of Scotland and through the Straits of Dover meet near (he Dogger Bank, and thereafter move in a medley of directions. The west wind is the prevailing wind, and it is more than probable that these multitudinous golf balls started on their journey with a sliced or pulled drive at seaford or North Berwick, or topped drives into burns and streams, and were trundled by current and wind up the Jutland coast. Now that the Floater is the prevailing ball, there should be quite a little by-industry in sorting the flotsam bn Scandinavian coasts. Fantastic numbers of balls have before now been netted by people who knew particular eddies in certain brooks and .rivers, but the Jutland coast seems rio.hei’ still.