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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XV, Issue 247, 18 October 1880, Page 4

A ball given by Mrs Naylor, a leading London " fashionable," must have been a very magnificent affair, according to the following very brief description given in Vanity Fair: —Every possible combination of flowers, fruit, palm trees, and ice-blocks, which could be imagined to turn a common-place Belgravian mansion into a fairy palace had been devised and carried out One of the prettiest features was the weeping ash, which, really growing in the garden, was converted into a fountain, jets of water being made to play from it as if every branch were a waterfall. The whole of the garden, belonging to the house wbb covered in, and strongly too, so that the heavy rain which fell during the day had no effect, while the walla were covered and thefloor carpeted with brilliant crimson drugget. The lighting, too, was well arranged, for no part was dark and yet there was no disagreeable glare. The prettiest and moat novel •effect was produced by the. bowers of real grapes, in which you could eat, dribJr, and flirt. These extended along the whole length of the corridor, and terminated in a little bower "of bliss, decorated with pretty curtains and flowers, which was arranged as a smoking room for the Prince of "Wales and his friends. It is said that this ball cost £10,000. The UsHs op Watbb. —The Chicago Tribune recently had the following in its leading oolumns:—" There can be no question that water, especially of the brand used in Chicago, is a dangerous drink. Undoubtedly water is good in its place, and is an indispensable adjunct to navigation, an excellent medium for the promotion of emigration, valuable for house-cleaning, swim-ming-schools, and steam boilers, and superb as the receptacle for sewage, besides being a perfect conductor of scarlefc fever, typhoid fever, and diphtheria, when taken in its primitive stage. But when it is considered that the refuse of the great City of Chicago is dumped into it every day, that the heavier stuff goes to the bottom to decay, and that the lighter article, like distillery elope, sewage, inanimate dogs and defunct cats, float about ou the surface 'stealing and giving odour,' can.one be too careful bow he consumes such a heterogeneous mixture, and sets an example to children whose tender bodies ere peculiarly susceptible to its

insidious influences ? Can any one set a glass even of the comparatively pure liquid pumped out of Lake Michigan by tbe side of a glass even of (be amber beer, with its mantle of snowy cream and its fragrant bouquet of malt and hops, and hesitate as to the relative healthiness of the two ? Can any one examine a drop of even the purest water, crowded with all sorts of winged and horned organisms, and then tbink of the myreids more of disgusting aniooaloufas that have wrigglad through the eewers and crawled into it, and coolly turn his body into a menagerie of such • small deer,' when beer is so plenty, Bnd co good/ One of those extraordinary and unaccountable panics, which every now aud then break out in differereut parts of India, appears to bo now prevailing in Madras city. A rumour has got abroad and is firmly believed in by the lower classes of tbe natives, that tbe Government is about to sacrifice a number of human beings in order to insure the safety of the new harbourworks. and has ordered tbe police to seize victims in the streets. So thoroughly is the idea implanted that people are afraid to venture out after night-fall. There was a similiar scare in Calcutta some seven or eight years ago when the Hoogly bridge was being constructed. The natives then got hold of the idea that Mother Ganges, indignant at being bridged, had at last consented to submit to the insult on the condition that each pier of the structure was founded on a layer of children's heads. These and many similar instances that might be quoted did space allow show how little our Western civilisation, even where longest established, has affected the lives and the belief of the masses. — Times.