BREVITIES

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2515, 12 April 1881, Page 4

BREVITIES

The job that was perpetrated over the foundations of the Sydney Town Hall turns out; on further inquiry, to be even worse than was anticipated. Not only was the whole work scamped, but the contractor was paid for a great deal more than was executed. The late city architect defends himself by saying that as he was not allowed a clerk of works, and had not time to measure up himself, ho certified to the contractor’ statements, having perfect confiderca in their integrity. He now offers to make good any overpayment that has been made ; but the City Council will not listen to any proposal for compounding the offence in this way, and insist on legal proceedings. An Australian publican was recently fined for serving a man on Sunday who had travelled in all the heat and dust seven miles and a half instead of the ten indicated by statute. Three months imprisonment was the well-deserved punishment the Perth magistrate gave a West Autrnlian larrikin who cut the telegraph wires for a lark.

It is said that 30,000 out or 40,000 townships of France are open to evangelical pleaching. A Catholic priest re cently complained that he could not go anywhere in France without seeing Bibles and Protestant tracts.

Fifty-two persons died in England in the year 1880, leaving fortunes of £IOO,OOO and upwards. Three of them left mote than a £1,000,000 —the Duke of Portland, £1,500,000 ; Mr John Williams, of Caerhayes, Castle Cornwall, £1,600,000 ; and Mr Thomah Rigley, of Timberhurst, Lancashire, £1,300,000. At a recent exhibition by the Cremation Society of Milan the body of Alessandro Manzoni, the author of the “ Premessi Sposi,” was displayed within a glazed coffin with so startingly lifelike an appearance that it would never have crossed a beholder’s mind that he had been dead seven days, to say nothing of the fact that ho had been dead seven years.

A very large order for steel rails has been recently given out by the New South Wales Government, and has been competed for by the leading railmakers in Great Britain. The order, which amounts to 29,950 tons, has been divided among several firms, A ’sad calamity has overtaken two families in Paris for the use of an American stove in the bedrooms, where a mother, her only daughter, and a friend with whom she was visiting were suffocated by fumes from the stove. Without good ventilation coke and charcoal are a most dangerous fuel.

The Melbourne “ Herald learns that money is still flowing into the banks at an unprecedented rate, and that bankers are very greatly embarrased indeed at the riches under their control, for much of which they cannot find profitable employment.

The select Committee of the Victorian Assembly appointed to inquire into and report on the advisability or otherwise of amending the law relating to vaccination, recommended that a Bill be brought in to amend the present Vaccination Act so as to provide for the establishment of depots for supplying lymph from young heifers, and also providing that no children be vaccinated during the months of January and February. A bootmaker named Palmer, at the Ternora, whilst suffering from delirium trewens, jumped out of his bed to escape capture by imaginary ruffians, rushed down one of the streets, and on reaching the claims let himself down a shaft by the windlass rope. The shaft was 85ft deep, and the bottom fctrewed with quartz boulders, and how he escaped being dashed to pieces seems inexplicable.

Thomas Tute, aged 10 years, has been sentenced to gaol for highway robbery. The baby buccaneer was in the habit of attacking boys' of twelve and fourteen wherever he found one of them alone on the bay shore, Cash, jack knives, handkerchiefs, and slate pencils composed his booty. A Scotch clergyman (the Eev. A. Bisset, of the Free South Church, Peterhead) has retired from the presidency of the local temperance society for the curious reason that some_ members of the choir appeared as “ nigger ” minstrels at the recent annual festival of the society. He stated that he would not have objected to the singers appearing “in their natural state.”