NEWS IN BRIEF.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3765, 10 March 1928, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

In spite of the magnificent work of London County Council in housing schemes, there are still 200,000 houses unfit for habitation in unhealthy areas in London, According to Herr Emil Ludwig, the well-known German biographer, Bismarck smoked a hundred thousand cigars and drank five thousand bottles of champagne in five years.

Admission to the Sunday services in the Temple Church, London, is a privilege reserved for members of the Middle and Inner Temple and those persons to whom the Benchers issue tickets.

The first corduroy material was corded from silk and manufactured exclusively for kings of France, who wore it chiefly while hunting. From that fact it derived its name of “Cord du roy.”

No new churches have been built in the last ten years in thirteen English dioceses* including Canterbury, Bristol, Carlisle, Coventry, Exeter, Gloucester, Hereford, and Southwark.

Gleaning, one of the oldest country customs in England, is dying out, as most of the corn grown is sent to steam mills in towns, and the cottager cannot get his corn ground locally. The longest long-distance telephone cable in the British Empire is now being constructed in Canada. It will ultimately connect Toronto and Buffalo, by way of Hamilton, Grimsby, and Welland. Over 2000 lads under the age of twenty-one are sent to prison every year in Britain. Some of the inmates of the prisons have been convicted as often as twenty times before they are twenty-one years old. Oil paintings, woodwork, miniatures, a model engine, illuminated addresses, and picture-frames, all the work of a railway porter at Paddington Station, were among the exhibits at a recent exhibition held at that station.

Dr. Thaddeus L. Bolton,'head of the Department of Psychology, Temple University in America, states that cows, horses, monkeys, and dogs laugh and that smiling is a cultured or refined form of laughter in man.

The perfect square meal, containing the proper . balance of vitamins, according to British dietitians, includes cold chicken and egg sauce, new potatoes, salad, corn flour mold, fruit salad with cream, whole wheat bread, butt,er, and lem'onade.

In some of the larger cigar factories in Havana, the employees hire men to read to them while they work, and so relieve the monotony of their task. In one factory every room has a special reader, and votes are taken as to the book to be read.

The French Chamber of Deputies has passed a bill making it obligatory upon the owner of lost property when recovered to pay the finder a reward of five per cent, of the value. This'rate is reduced to two per cent, on property worth more than £BOO.

Among the manufactures now being carried on at Slough are concrete, ironfounding, engineering of all sorts, printing ink, joinery, ointment, surgical dressings, printing, sweets, jam, and soap. AIL these have been established within the last seven years. Bottles are turned out at the rate of 1,000,000 a week by a new machine invented by a London solicitor. Without any experience of machine constructing, he started work some years ago on improving the machinery of a firm of which he was a director.

Certain clergymen in England are revolting against tlie wearing of elergical dress, stigmatising it as depressing and dismal. The wearing of ordinary dress, says one, might be the means of restoring that contact with the man in the thirdclass carriage which the church had undoubtedly lost.' “Adobe,” the humble sun-dried brick used by the primitive Mexicans and early settlers in America in building, has. been revived in the United States. Many modern small homes and ranch houses are now being built with home-made adobe bricks, chiefly, it may be imagined, on the score of novelty and not on account of economy.

Gypsy weddings' are generally unconventional. Said a gypsy woman to the pensions authorities at an English town recently: “I did not get married at a church. I was married at a fair. My husband and I both jumped over a broomstick. That was our custom.” It was her excuse for not producing her marriage certificate. Another drop in the timber trade of the Dominion is revealed by figures for 1927 which have just been released. Both imports and exports have fallen, imports by 5,700,000 super feet, exports by 4,i 800,000 feet. Ten thousand seedling redwoods are ready in the Christchurch Public Gardens to be transplanted this year to a site that has to be selected for them. They are only a few inches high, but are sufficiently robust to give ample promise that, if allowed, they will reach to the gigantic size, perhaps over 300 feet which redwoods attain in their native soil in California. The species, Sequoia sempervirens, is des‘ cribed as one of the most graceful of the conifers when young, and as the tallest American tree when This gem came in the country mail on Wednesday (reports the Wanganui Chronicle). “I have two

excellent, if rather youthful 'reasons’ against daylight saving. A family in this township was blessed with twins on Sunday morning. The first arrived at 2.50 a.m., Sidey time. At 3 a.m. we put the clock back to 2 a.m., and then at 2.50 a.m. tha other child was born. Tin question arises, ‘Were, they both born at the same hour and minute?' And further, ‘if the second child had been born at 2.40 a.m. would it be a minute older than the first?”