NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 2996, 9 February 1926, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Fewer widows are remarrying in England than at any other time for the past half-century. Most of England’s mistletoe comes from abroad, since English countryfolk have not tried to cultivate it seriously.

One famous orphan school in South London was closed recently owing to the lack of applications for admission.

In the stomach of a 201 b. pike, 'sent to be preserved at Oswestry, were found a 31b. rainbow trout and a ilb. perch.

' A statue of Alexander the Great, in gold and dating probably from his time, has been stolen from a museum in Sofia.

‘•'To live long one must keep active,” says Lord Phillimore, a famous lawyer, now eighty-one years of age. “Idleness is fatal.”

The broad arrow worn on prisoners’ clothing is to be abolished in England and the hair is no longer to be cut short in prisons.

Oaks and aspens, as well as the traditional apple-trees, are frequently found in England bearing growths of mistletoe.

During the last six years John Seai’le, a bedroom steward on the Aquitania, has made 70 trips to the United States without going ashore. Ice which is harvested from a lake at Ashton-under-Lyne is stored away in underground cellars where it keeps for six or eight months.

Railway carriages reserved for people who are suffering from a cold is one novel suggestion for preventing the spread of infection in England. A hare escaping from a shooting party in Lincolnshire, went into a 'farmhouse, ran upstairs, and sat on the landing. The farmer’s dog killed it.

Among working women, teachers 'are said to be the best savers, while actresses are usually the worst. This is based on savings bank statistics. A- woman firing a revolver at a picnic near Annecy, Savoy, missed her aim, and the bullet rebounded from a rock and went through her head. A letter posted in the Isle of Wight at 8 p.in. reached a village in Sussex, 40 miles away, the next day but one —36 hours for forty miles. As a result of a deathbed confession a man of 75, who was wrongly accused and had spent 33 years in prison, has just been liberated at Cologne. Nearly £400,000 has already been spent in freeing the slaves of Nepal, and it is expected that slavery will soon have been completely abolished there.

Men are not entering the weaving industry nowadays in any great numbers. In some districts as many as 90 per cent, of the weavers are women.

Mr R. C. Andrews, who found the dinosaur eggs, says there is evidence the ancient Azilians used to make necklaces of them 20,000 years ago.

There is only one acre of open space to every 14,000 inhabitants of the Southwark district of London —and there is no chance of remedying the deficiency. Mr. W. Meek, one of the ticket collectors at Kent House station, who has just retired after 52 years, remembers when signal lamps were lit by candles. London is the least musical port of Great Britain, according to a publisher of popular music. He puts Lancashire at the head of the list, followed by Glasgow. A music-hall audience in Paris, having hissed a poet who denounced the war in Morocco, greatly applauded two seals which followed him on the stage. “A. little hot water with sugar in it is better than alcohol for the cure of fatigue caused by work,” said Sir Charters J. Symonds, the famous surgeon, recently. Herr Edmund Stinnes, son of the late Hugo Stinnes, the German millionaire, has gone to the United States, where he intends to settle and begin life afresh.

Keindeer drives are to be added to the pleasures of the London Zoo very shortly. Two of these animals are now being trained to draw a small wheeled vehicle.

A law has lately been passed in Italy to stop all interference with bird’s nests and eggs. Parents are heavily fined if their children are found robbing the nests. After having been carefully tended, an injured magpie picked up in a London street was set at liberty, but after crossing the street it at once flew back to its cage. Several plants, including the mimosa, arc stated to show distinct signs of muscular contraction on being struck. This is said to point out that plants have a sense of feeling. An accumulator small enough to be carried in the waistcoat pocket, and yet with sufficient power to drive a motor car for ten days, has been invented by a Kussian scientist. As yet it is only in the experimental stage.

Just a tiny particle of dust, hardly as large as a pinhead, is blamed for a recent railroad wreck in Europe. The engineer of an express train, it is said, was temporarily blinded when dirt lodged in his eye, and he failed to see stop signals. Birds are reported to be doing a considerable amount of damage to wheat crops in the Kungitikei district this season. There is apparently a shortage of other feed, for the birds’ depredations in this direction —more particularly those of sparrows —arc more extensive than

usual. Farmers arc much preturbcd at their already comparatively small yields being lightened still further in this manner (says the Wanganui Chronicle). “Large holdings must go.” This emphatic declaration was made by the Hon. A. D. McLeod, Minister of Lands. Ho said that, so far as land' settlement was concerned, there would have to be great changes in the future. Many of the large holdings would have to go into smaller subdivisions, as it was only by putting people on the land that good Government could be maintained, and Communistic ideas frustrated.

A story ;s told of two youths who were fishing in the Taihape district recently, and who, while having lunch were unexpectedly accosted by a ranger. Asked to produce their licenses, the pair stood irresolute, and then one bolted, hotly pursued by the ranger. A long chase ended in capture, and then the angry and gasping ranger demanded his captive’s name. “What for?” inquired the captive. “For not having a license,” was the sharp reply. “But I have one, and here it is,” said the captive, as he fished a bit of paper from his pocket. “Wei, why on earth did you run?” shouted the now thoroughly incensed ranger “I wanted to give my cobber a. chance to get away. He hasn’t one. - ” The ranger’s indignation may more easily be imagined then expressed.