GENERAL NEWS.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXI, Issue 8779, 5 April 1907, Page 1

GENERAL NEWS.

. * I An Aberdeen clergyman had an unfortunate experience. "While preaching in the pulpit a sneak thief entered the vestry and carried off the rev. gentleman's overcoat and boots. A dog died at Scarborough of broken heart because of tho death of its mistress. The animal pined away in spite of every attention, and a post mortem examination showed that there was no disease about it. A man who claimed to be a diver got sixty days' imprisonment at Edinburgh for alleged diving into other people's pockets at tramway stopping plaee3. A Path clergyman, an enthusiastic mountaineer, put his nerve to practical IW6 by climbing to the top of bis church steeple to see if the structure was in a sound condition.

A straying horse, seeing its re flec'ion in a Chorley (Lancashire) shop window, lifted a forefoot and smashed the plate glass. Going to a second window it repeated the action. The shopkeeper recovered £& 7s Gd from the owner of the horre in the county court. The medical egg is the latest effort of American enterprise. A New Jersey gentleman feeds his hens on [this or that medicinal diet, and an egg to match. By this msans (the Daily Graphic says) he c'aims to be selling the " iron-tonic egg," the "phosphated egg,'' and the •' arsenious egg."

Speaking at a social at Manaia, Taranaki, Mr T. L. Joll, dairy factory proprietor, expressed a doubt as to whether the present high and still increasing values of land were a genuine blessing to the district, and suggested that prices had now just about reached the limit, and if still farther increases occurred the district might very well consider itself i.i a state of "boom."

A traveller thus describes a typical scene to day in the streets of Tirnova, the ancient capital of Bulgaria:— "The carts, hauled by slow and cumbrous buffaloes, screech; ponies packed with wood jostle along under much swearing and whacking; a bony donkey, piled high with cocks and hens tied together with twine, is driven by a big, brawny, redpetticoated woinaD, whose stick is plied on the nose cf every buffalo or pony which does not swerve out of ihe way." A romantic story is told of M. Jean Gerardy, the famous 'cellist. A few years ago h 9 broke off his engagement with a lady between whom and himself there existed the greatest affection, purely because ho felt it was wrong and selfish of any artist who know that his life must be a roaming one to ask another to share it. For two yoard he remained firm to his purpose, but the lady was present in the front row at his recital in London last November, and he was so deeply moved by seeing her once more that at a subsequent meeting they b.came engaged again, and are to be married in the early spring. " Such are the difficulties attending the administration of justice here," writes a Port Darwin correspondent to the Argus, "that prisoners and native witnesses alike have been detained for over a year in gaol." A pretty state of things indeed for a British community! Ihe matter hag been brought more prominently under notice than uaual by the recent escape from custody of a native named Bobby, who figured as a witness in a murder case in 1905, and who, as a witness, has been in gaol ever since awaiting the trial of the natives accused o£ the murder.