NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2586, 29 May 1923, Page 1

NEWS AND NOTES.

The river Thames starts with seven tiny rills, which are four miles from Cheltenham.

Miss Lillie Bowmer, a seventeen-year-old Honolulu school girl, set a new world’s record for a fifty yards’ swim in twenty-eight seconds, reducing Moriechin Weselan’s former record by 4-5 of a second. Miss Bowmer swam in a tank. Mount Etna continues to threaten eruption. The crater, which was opened in 1911, has renewed its activities with loud roaring, throwing incandescent matter to a great height. The lava stream is ten yards deep, and is advancing slowly, but continuously.

Advices from Bergen state that it is now settled that Captain Amundsen will start for the North Pole from Wainright, Alaska, returning to Spitzbergen about June 20. The journey is expected to take 22 hours. A Norwegian patrol ship and two seaplanes will assist in the flight, the former cruising on the edge of the Polar ice north of Spitzbergen, while the seaplanes will fly northward to the Pole to meet Captain Amundsen and escort him home or help if necessary. A destructive fire last Friday afternoon totally destroyed Glengarry homestead, about three miles from Dannevirke. It was a wooden building, consisting of 22 rooms, part being old and a considerable portion new. It is surmised that the fire originated in the region of the hot water service, and through lack of fire-fighting facilities, nothing could be done to fight the flames, which consumed the building in a very short time. Practically nothing was saved. The structure and furniture were the property of Major James Armstrong, and were valued at about £8,500 and were insured for approximately £6,500. A farmer wrote to the editor of an agricultural paper asking for a method of ridding his orchard of the grass-hopper plague. In the same mail the editor received a request for advice from an anxious mother about her baby twins, who were having a hard time teething. The editor’s stenographer mixed the roplies with the result that the farmer received the following: “Wrap flannel cloths around their throats. Rub their gums with castor oil and massage their stomachs twice a day.” The anxious mother received this startling advice: “Cover with dry straw. Soak thoroughly with coal oil and apply a match! The little pests will soon stop bothering you.”

If I were asked to choose half a dozen men who were most important in the history of the world at this time, T should name as one of them Lord Robert Cecil, says Frank Dilnot in the New York Outlook. He holds no ministerial position, his party affiliations are difficult to define, he is subjected to a great deal of criticism. And yet his work, his talents, his individuality, make him one of the moving forces in the cause of humanity. That does not mean he is a paragon or altogether admirable, for a more complex figure never appeared on the stage of human affairs. He is a born aristocrat, retaining in his fibre aristocratic prejudices, and yet he is a real democrat at soul. He calls himself a Conservative; there was never a more passionate believer in real Liberal principles. He is a remarkably successful commercial lawyer: and the moving impulse of his life is religion.