LONDON TOWN TALK.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 199, 9 December 1876, Page 2

LONDON TOWN TALK.

(From the Correspondent of the Melbourne Argus.)

We are having, over here, a sort of ludicrous parody of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, in the commitment to York Gaol of seven of the Board of "Guardians of Keighley, Yorkshire, for refusal to carry out the provisions of the Vaccination Act. These idiots, who are really seven, I am sorry to say, and not like Wordsworth's seven, six of whom "in-the churchyard lay," are friends of the small-pox, and have invited it to Keighley to stay as long as it pleases. Even in a provincial vestry tlus is a percentage of fools that is quite alarming. They have been bailed out at £2,000 a head, and as soon as the lunatics found themselves at large, were enter-, tained by some other madmen calling themselves the Anti-vaccination Society. In a word, the seven are martyrs,. and we all know how difficult that class of people is to deal ■■with. They;%pg,y. catch the smallpox ; as poor GSfeßrt A'Beckett used to not. tip*? pitted. It is of the labourers have embraced with Mm into partnership. Perhaps-, they have read, terrible things of what is done under that name in the city, and are afraid of being mixed up with some commercial scandal. "At present money is a "drug." The Financier tells a story of a banker friend who is in despair because a customer has given him £IOO,OOO on deposit. "He is an old friend, and I could not refuse to take it, but what on earth am I do with the money 1" If I knew this financial gentleman's address, nothing would please me better than to relieve him of his embarrassment.

Mr. Vrain Lucas, the inventor of the Pascal forgeries, which took in so many literary folks, has got into serious trouble — no less than four years' imprisonment for swindling some Paris publishers. The moral of this is that you may impose upon authors as much as you please, but not upon the authors' masters. The watchmakers of Besanconhave been making Madame Maciiahon a nice little present —a watch so small that the time cannot be read off it without a" glass of high magnifying power. The Duke d'Aumale, who was present at. the ceremony, remarked that an ancestor of his, the Due da Pentaievre, wore watches in his waistcoat buttons, and, to show that the family taste in that way was not extinct, ordered on the spot some fairy chronometer's for his shirt and wrist studs. I can fancy few things more alarming than to hear one's neighbour at a dinner party striking at intervals from all his bhstons and all his studs.

well-known spot in London is a up to that English queen who poison from her husband's woafitl', %p{ save his life. T,ie office was a disagfe%bie one, • but not, as I underdangerous to the operator, albeit, "s§ie was, in a manner, canonised for it. Nowadays, when heroes and heroines—and even saints —are more common than they used to be (for that such is the case, any honest man can see for himse'f by looking at the'hrst newspaper), there is ■no such great fuss made about t.iem. In the Manchester luiirmary, two months ago, a scrofulous lad had one of his legs cut' off, and was bleeding to death when the old remedy of "transfusion " was suggested by the house surgeon. A medical student of the name of Irwin at once offered himself, and a pint of his life's blood was drawn from him, and injected into the veins of the dying boy, the result of which was that the patient's life was saved, and that he is now doing well. Whether the old story concerning Pope Innocent is true or not, which, states how three young lives in succession -were sacrificed (and in vain) to eke out his own ebbing powera, it is certain that such an experiment is not made without peril, and here \ge have not a queen endangering her life,£3S she doubtless imagined, for her royajSonsort, but a mere student of midithe like for a non-paying patient'—and not. even his own patient. A letter' in the Times stating the bare facts is at present all that has appeared in the way of. public acknowledgement of what seems to me a very heroic action, the record of which, at least, deserves to be preserved in the amber of the Argus.

The ex-Sent to which people lie about any public character—and maliciously lie if he does not please then#-*vas curiously exemplified the other day ih a speech made by the notorious " Brother Ignatius" concerning Dean Stanley, who, I believe, has the misfortune to he his cousin. In publicly denouncing the latter's lafcitudinarianism, he declared that he knew an old -woman" in London (whose name and address he gave) whom the Dean visited in his ministerial capacity, and thus instructed :—" It is not- so necessary to read the Holy Scriptures as to study Shakespeare." Imagine the idiotcy of a man capable of believing this, and the malignity which prompted his repetition of it at a public meeting. • A humorous thing—especially if humor really consists as some have stated in its unexpectedness—has lately happened in Cambridgeshire. A Mr. Jary, a Tory tenant farmer, living under a Tory landlord, General Hall, summarily dismissed one day every haj\d on his farm who had taken any part in the agricultural strike. He was a member of the Farmers' Agricultural Association, and to all appeals for mercy answered, " We have our union," and have a "right to do what we like with our own." Now .General Hall-has died, and the son who has succeeded him has (some call them) sentimental, others just view 3, of the relations between employers anl employed. He writes to Mr. Jary to tall him that as his leaae expires at Michaelmas he will, have to give .up, possession. Mr. Jary ia at once in a glow

of indignation, and asks in the nafie oi heaven why. The answer is that the new landlord did not approve of his late high- I handed conduct, but if he will take those ~" laborers back who have been dismissed for no other crime than joining the union he may keep his farm. At this the whole of the landed interest in Cambridgeshire is shocked and outraged. They never heard of such oppression and cruelty, and they don't at all see that there is the least parallel between what Mr. Jary did to his men and what his master has done to Mr. Jary. -