GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2383, 24 January 1922, Page 4

GENERAL NEWS ITEMS.

M. Diagne, Deputy for Senegal and commissioner-general for French black troops, has written a letter to M. Briand, asking the Government to introduce a proposal for the transfer of the remains of an unknown black soldier who died fighting for Fi’ance to Dakar, Fi’ench West Africa, for burial there.

Romans were inveterate lubbers; indeed even now some of us vaguely connect this habit with the fall of Rome. Then came a long period when civilisation rejected the bath. The first bathtub used in America was designed by Adam Thompson in 1842, and press, pulpit, medicine and the public united in condemning this innovation. Philadelphia seriously considex’ed making bathing illegal between November Ist and March 15th. Virginia laid a tax of £6 on evei’y tub, while Boston actually made bathing unlawful except on advice of a physician. Then, in 1851, President Fillmore installed a bathtub in the White House, and made its use fashionable. Now our hotels boast of a bath to every room, and the compulsory bath'menace those peripatetic philosophers who, in their pursuit of the simple life, place the tub in the same category with manual labour. The Berliners are storming the shops. Everybody is buying everything and anything in order to have a solid possession instead of their paper mai’ks, the value of which is hourly deei’easing. In a great department store people were standing in files in every department to buy goods before the prices go up. A woman told me that she had had to wait two hours at one of the great dressmaker’s before her turn came to get an evening gown. Women were literally fighting for hats. Men are in the movement of the hour. The hosiers are doing a roaring trade in shirts and ties. A shirt maker in Unterden Linden told me he could not execute all the orders he had received in the last day or two for a month. Men are ordering suits which otherwise they would have done without because they know prices are bound to rise. Housewives ai’e getting stores of jam, tinned meat, fruit, milky-Jewels, foreign stamps —in fact, every conceivable thing is being bought up. Philip Raimondo, who said he was a playwright, a former attache of the American Embassy at Paris, and that lie had been decorated for service at Cambrai when the Eleventh Engineers dropped their picks, grabbed their rifles, and plugged the gap in the British lines, was arraigned in a New York Court a short time ago, charged with stealing a loaf of bread. Raimondo was thin and haggard, and his clothes were threadbare. He said he had been sleeping in parks and hallways for several weeks. The magistrate discharged him when the complainant refused to press a charge, and though the man at first refused, induced him to accept a small collection taken up for him in the courtroom.