Our Miscellany.

Southern Cross, Volume 1, Issue 2, 8 April 1893, Page 6

Our Miscellany.

It lias been computed tliat tlie ■world’s consumption of coal amounts to about 1,000,000 cwt per hour. When a person becomes too good to ■overlook the faults of th e unfortunate, he makes the error which loses to him the glory of his goodness. The largest British wooden ship is the Three Brothers, of 2963 tons register, built at Boston, United States, in 1855. She is 324 feet long, 48 feet broad and 31 feet deep. Butler, whose murders in Dunedin some years ago thrilled the colony with horror, is now at the Terrace Gaol, Wellington, and his time, by his marks, will expire in about a year. It was rumoured in Glasgow a few ■weeks ago that General Booth intends to make a raid with the Salvation Army into the Highlands. Hitherto the Army has been unable to penetrate the Highlands of Scotland and North Wales, and both are now to be attacked. Common sense is the knack of seeing things as the}' are, and doing things as they ought to be done. — [C. E. Stowe. One street in Chicago, in which city the World’s Pair opens next month, is 19 miles in length. Mr John Speir, Newton Earm, Lanarkshire, has calculated that as much work can be done on a farm now in 15y days as could have been done between 1810-20 in 53 days. A Home paper says it appears, from what a tourist lately returned from llussia relates, that in certain parts of the country all the bullocks and cows wear blue glass eye-preservers on account of certain diseases occasioned by the glare of snow in the plains. Skating at Didlington recently, says a correspondent in the Field, we found the ice so extraordinarily clear that , we could plainly see the fish beneath us, and it was quite a novelty pursuing the pike. The other day a certain newspaper inquired with well-feigned innocence : “ How can five persons divide five eggs so that each man will receive one, and still one remain in the dish ?” After several hundred people had went nearly distracted in the mazes of this proposition, the journal meanly said :• —“ One takes the dish with the egg” The wreck was lately reported of a vessel which, if not actually the oldest vessel afloat, is, or was, at any rate, a long way over being a centenarian. The vessel is the Jersey barque Eliza, and was built as far back as 120 years ago. She appeared in the register long before . steamships came into existence, and for some time ran between Plymouth and Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a packet ship. She afterwards went into the fish-carrying between Newfoundland and the Brazils, and was wrecked there. Bishop Fowler, in a sermon at Minneapolis, alluded to Jay Gould in this characteristic way —“A man fell down last week in New York and they put him in his grave. He left a hundred millions behind him, and not one cent before him. PAPER WEIGHED IN. It was sought in the case of Harris v. Allwood, in the Queen’s Bench Division, on appeal from the Wolverhampton magistrates, to make a grocer liable for fraud under the Weights and Measure Act by selling groceries weighed in paper and including the weight of the paper in the article, there being ten drachms in the pound against the purchaser. The purchaser, an inspector, the respondent in the present appeal, admitted that it was the practice of grocers to weigh the articles in paper, and he made no protest against the practice, which was for the mutual convenience of the purchaser and vendor. The magistrates had convicted, but Mr Justice Mathew now quashed the conviction.

lidding that there was no fraud on the grocer’s part, as the practice was universally followed and understood all over the kingdom, and also well known to both buyer and seller. A SPIDER COLLECTOR. An American recently died in the Alps who literally devoted his life to spiders. He has left a collection of some twenty-eight thousand distinct varieties. One would hardly think there were many more spiders in existence. This man had them arranged in sections, in classes, fully labelled. He began studying spiders when a boy. He had a room that he would allow no one to sweep or clean, and encouraged the spiders tp such an extent that they would come to him and feed out of his hand. He discovered that by repeatedly destroying a web a spider reached a stage where his power of reproducing web is exhausted. The spider, when that stage was reached, attacked and killed another spider and took his ball of web from him. Just like a human being, don’t you see P Before this man died he embalmed his knowledge of spiders in two volumes. AN EFFECTUAL CUKE. Strategy is a thing to be admired when it is employed for the circumvention of rogues. While the Trench were in Mexico, stage robberies on the Monterey road became very frequent. The Trench commander resolved to put a stop to them, and this is how he did it. He dressed up half-a-dozen Zouaves in ladies’ attire, and sent them on in the next stage, their faces hidden by veils, their carbines concealed by their petticoats. The stage was stopped; the ladies, without waiting to be invited, left the vehicle and fell into line with the rest of the passengers. Suddenly a series of reports came from that line, and some dozen robbers lay dead : the rest discreetly disappeared. Tor a long while afterwards it was only requisite to display a shawl and bonnet conspicuously to secure a free passage for a stage on that road.