MISCELLANEOUS.

Patea Mail, Volume VIII, Issue 989, 26 January 1883, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS.

A very difficult piece of house-cleaning has . men accomplished in the White' ‘House,\ Washington, Each of the three 'immense; and silver chandeliers in the.- East contains over six thousand separate* pieces of glass, and four skilled mechanics worked over a fortnight polishing .each piece by hand. - * l * f ,J V: ' AL ' ' According to the St. Jamet'.s Gazette there* is at present in Constantinople a . veritable centenarian who is the object of much veneration. His name*is Hod Bey, and he is descended from, one of,the principal families’ of the mountain tribe of the Shabesbish; He is 1 20*7 ears old''and "still preserves .all his faculties.- , Speaking of the strike of "tailoresses, the ' Melbourne correspondent of the 'st/mey : '. Mormufj JETerald write? —‘T Possibly out of this strike will come a discussion 1 of thewhole question of the employment of young women.. It is quite, certain that a totally mistaken estimate.has been formed by, these latter of their relations to society, and that domestic servitude- is looked 1 -upon’- by -them- as degrading. -If the only bad result of this error were the inconvenience it occasions to those who keep servants,'.it might be got over,’but there is the much more serious outcome of utterly undomesticated wives and The homes of the class to which these girls belongare depressing in their comfortlessness. It is not the comfprtlcssnoss of poverty, but of ignorance of what should make a house bright and cheery. They are untidy and slatternly, and the untidiness and slatternliness dp not appear to produce any feeling o f dissatisfaction in the minds of those who live in their midst. The result of homes such as these is the lanikin of , both- sexes, for although familiarity with domestic unlovclincss may cause no apparent discontent, it offers no attractions. The consequence is that the young people who "live in such homes get out into the streets as much as they ■ can of an evening, and we know very .well what this facility of intercourse has led to. The ideal home life of the well-to-do working man has no existence in this city.” The health Officer of the densely populated London suburb of Kensington has been discussing the distribution of small-pox in his district,.and points to the remarkable frequency of the cases in which .a female domestic servant was the only person first ill in a house- In most of such cases, moreover, the symptoms first showed themselves on Sunday, at a period when they would be expected to develop, in the assumption that the disease had been contracted on the previous Sunday week, when the sufferer was enjoying her Sunday out.” “ Sunday out,” there was grave reason to fear, not unfrequently led to the introduction, from the overcrowded houses of the poor, of the attacks of zymotic disorders. Inexplicable attacks of infectious disease' 3 cart only .be cleared up by such searching investigation as this.