ENGLISH EXTRACTS.

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume III, Issue 160, 10 February 1847, Page 4

ENGLISH EXTRACTS.

A great Archery Meeting has been held at *York : there were twenty targets, and one hundred competitors. The total value ofthe stakes at Goodwood •races was £22, 905 exclusive of the Orange prize. Of these, Mr. Gully won £5480 and Xord G. Bentinck £5055. The congregation of Percy KUhapel have presented the Rev. R. Mongomery the author of the Omnipresence of the ©city, &c«, with •a silver inkstand and a superbly bound Bible. A London curate, writing "to the Times, suggests, that to avoid the pestilence likely J to arise in families only occupying one room, 'there should be a house built to receive the dead, from the time of their death to their interment. He -says he has known cases of wretched families making a table of the In all Austrian Poland there is 'but one newspaper, and into that one politics are not admissible. General Ordoz, from the Philippine Isles, has been af pointed to supersede -General •O'Donnell, in the government of Cuba. Two important railways will be immediately proceeded with in Norway; from Christiana to Konigsberg, and from Drontheim to Roras. The Hungarian Jews have bought off the Tolerance Tax for £120,600 to be paid within five years. Don Miguel, who is described as deplorably poor, has petitioned the new Pope for a continuance of his pension.

A Money-digger. — An inquisitive Yankee, seeing a labourer digging on a retired spot, inquired what he was digging for. " Money," was the Teply. The fact was of course duly heralded to the curious in such matters, and the money-digger was "visited by three or foflr credulous fellows, When the following dialogue ensued : — Visitors — "" We are told that you are digging for money.', Labourer — " Well, I aint digging for anything else, and if you're wise you had better take hold also." Visitors — " Have you any luck?" Labourer — "First-rate luck. It pays well." No sooner said than done, the four fellows, thanking the generotfs delver for giving them an invitation to share in the golden harvest, off coats and went td work in good earnest, throwing out many loads of earth, till at length, getting very tired, the following colloquy took place : — Visitors — " When dhi you get any money last ?" Labourer — " Saturday night." Visitors—^' How much?" Labourer — " Four dollars md a half." Visitors — " That's rather small business." Labourer — ** It r s pretty Well ; -6fc. a day is the regular price for digging cellars all over town." The visiting loafers dropped spades and vanished, quite put out with the man who dug' money at the rate of 6s. a day.

Licensed Victuallers.— TMs body pays to Government yeaily for their licenses, their taxes, and the' duties oh spirits sold by them, the immense snm of 11,000,000/. The cost of the British army yearly is 3,500,000/. ; that of the navy, 5,000,0tf07. ; the coif of the metropolitan city police force, 506,000/. ; and that of the rural police thrdtighout the kingdom, 750,000/.; making a* total of 9,750,000/. Thus, then, it appears that the publicans of London pay sufficient to Government to support the army, tfavy, and

the whole of the police force established throughout the kingdom'^ A very severe shock of earthquake was experienced at Leghorn on the 14th of Aug. Several buildings were very much injured, and great consternation and alarm was spread through the town, buthappilyno lives were lost. In the districts of Dari and Kosignano, however, in the centre of the shock, the effects were most disastrous.; houses were thrown down, villages half destroyed, wells dried up, others filled with mud, masses of water appearing and disappearing in various spots, bituminous waters left on the surface, and those who were not actually buried in- the ruins, severly hurt and wounded, and the generality reduced to misery and destitution by the loss of all. Above forty individuals are ascertained to have perished, and more than double that number, seriously injured, were removed to the hospitals at Pisa and Leghorn.

Shocking Coo-l. — Most people have heard the story of the Irishman who, on being awakened one night with the intimation that the house was on fire, coolly turned himself and as coolly replied, "It is nothing to me, ■I am only a lodger." The anecdote has generally been looked upon as a joke, but the following incident may prove that it may have been no joke after all. One day last week, as the stage coach was being rapidly driven past a small village between Ayr and Maybole, a child, apparently between four and five years of age, was observed playing in the middle of the road, unconscious of the approaching danger. The driver, having given the alarm without effect, succeeded in pulling up just in the nick of time. A woman, who was observed lazily resting herself against the wall of a house, and looking upon the whole ! transaction with the utmost composure, while every person on the coach was painfully alarmed, on being asked by the indignant driver why she had not rushed to the rescue of a -child in such imminent danger, replied, with a look of surprise, and in tones of innocent simplicity, " The bairn's no mine." Improbable as this may appear, it is nevertheless a fact. — Glasgow Examiner.

A Free Trade Pie. — The inhabitants of Denby Dale commemorated the accomplishment of Sir Robert Peel's free trade measure in a somewhat singular manner on Monday last, not by the erection of a collosal statue, but by the raising -of a gigantic pie, which was placed on a waggon and drawn through the town and thence to Sissett, amidst the enthusiastic cheers of thousands of spectators and the enlivening notes of three bands of music. On the return of the procession to Denby Dale, the pie was cut in due form, and portions of it freely distributed to all who desired to partake of it ; particularly among the working classes, for whom it was originally designed. This immense pie of culinary architecture — the device of women's art and skill — measured 8 yards in circumference, 7 feet 10 inches in diameter, and 10 inches in depth. It was composed of two sacks of flour, which is equal to 34 stone 41b.; 1001b. of suet, 201b. of butter, 161b. of lard, 4 sheep, 1 lamb, half a calf, 2 geese, 2 couple of ducks, 5 couple of rabbits, 5 hares, 5 brace of partridges, a pheasant, a dozen of pigeons, 5 fowls, and sundry smaller birds. — Wakefield Journal.

Insect Produce. — The importance of insects, commercially speaking, is scarcely ever thought of. Great Britain does not pay less than a million of dollars annually for the dried carcases of the tiny insect, the Chochineal^ and another Indian insect, Gum Shellac, is scarcely less valaahle. More than a million and a half of human beings derive their sole support from the culture and manufacture of silk ; and the silk worm alone creates an annual circulating medium of nearly two hundred millions of dollars. Half a million of dollars is annually spent in England alone for foreign honey, at least 10,000 hundred weight of wax is imported into that country every year. Then there are the gall nuts of commerce, used for dying and making ink, &c. ; while the cantharides, or Spanish fly is absolute indispensable in materia medica. — Boston Paper.

Corked Mice ! — A good mode of destroying rats and mice is to cut old corks in slices 'as thin as wafers, and to fry them in a frying pan after it has been used for frying any meat, but not burnt ; place them about where the vermin appear, and all will be destroyed, .for they eat them voraciously.

The Marble Quarries of Carrara. — The Magra safely crossed in the ferry-boot — the passage is not by any means agreeable, when the current is swollen aud strong — we arrived at Carrata, within a few hours. In good time next morning we got some ponies, ' and went out to see the marble quarries. They are four of five g^eat glens', running up into a range of lofty hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped By beiDg ai fu'ptly strangled by nature. The quarries, or " caYe's," as they call them there, are so many openings, ' high up hi the hills, on either side of these

passes, where they blast and excavate for marble, which may turn out good or bad ; may make a man's fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great expence of working what is worth nothing. Some of these caves were opened by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour. Many others are being worked at this moment ; others are to be begun to-morrow, next week, next month ; others are unbougbt, unthought of; and marble enough for more ages than have passed since the place was resorted to, lies hidden everywhere : patiently awaitiug its time of discovery. A.s you toil and clamber up one of these steep gorges (having left your pony soddening his girths in water, a mile or two lower down), you hear, every now and then, echoing among the hil's, in a low tone, more silent than the previous silence, a melancholy warning bugle, — a signal to the miners to withdraw. Then, there is a thundering and echoing from hill, to hill, and perhaps a splashing up of great fragments of rocks into the air ; and on your toil again until some bugle sounds in a new direction, and you stop directly, lest you should come within the range of the new explosion.. There were numbers of meu, working high up in these hills — on the sides — clearing away, and sending down the broken masses of stone and earth, to make way for the blocks of marble that had been discovered. As these came rolling down from unseen hands into the narrow valley, I could not help thinking of the deep glen (just the same sort of glen) where the Roc left Sinbad the Sailor ; and where the merchants from above, flung down great pieces of meat for the diamonds to stick to. There are no ecgles here, to darken the sun in their swoop, and pounce upon them ; but it was as wild and fierce as if there had been hundreds. But the road, the road down which the marble comes, however immense the blocks ! The genius of the country, and the spirit of its institution, pave ' that road ; repair it, watch it, keep it going ! Conceive a channel of water running over a rocky bed, beset with great heaps of stones of all shapes and sizes, winding down the middle of the valley ; and that being the road — because it was the road five hundred years ago ! Imagine the clumsy carts of five hundred years ago, being used to this hour, and drawn, as they used to be five hundred years ago, by oxen, whose ancestors were worn to death fivj hundred years ago, as their unhappy descendants are now, in 12 months, by the suffering and agony of this cruel work ! Two pair, four pair, ten pair, twenty pair, to one block, according to its size ; down it must come, this way. In their struggling from stone to stone, with their enormous loads behind them, they die frequently upon the spot ; and not they alone ; for their passionate drivers, sometimes tumbling down in their energy, are crushed - to death beneath the wheels. But it was good five hundred years ago, and it must be good now • and a railroad down one of these steeps (the easiest thing in the world) would be flat blasphemy. When we stood aside, to see one of these cars drawn by only a pair of oxen (for it had but one small block of marble on coming down), I hailed, in my heart, the man who sat upon the heavy yoke, to keep it on the neck of the poor beasts — and who faced backward, not before him — as a very devil of true despotism. He had a great rod in his hand, with an iron point ; and when they could plough and force their way through the loose bed of the torrent no longer, and came to a stop, he poked it into, their bodies, beat it on their heads, screwed it rouud and round in their nostrils, got them on a yard or two, in the madness of intense pain ; repeated all these persuasions, with increased intensity of purpose, when they stopped again ; got them on once more ; forced and goaded them to an abrupter point of the descent ; and when their writhing and smarting, and the weight behind them, bore them plunging down the precipice in a cloud of scattered water, whirled his rod above his head, and gave a great whoop and halloo, as if he had achieved something, and had no idea that they might shake him off, and blindly mash his brains upon the road, in the noontide of his triumph. — From Dickens' s Pictures from Italy.