NEWS BY THE MAIL.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1801, 11 October 1888, Page 3

NEWS BY THE MAIL.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s dedication of “ The Black Arrow ” to his wife is ingenious and unique. In it he sajrs: «I have watched with interest, with pain, and at length with amusement, your unavailing attempts to purusel “ The Black Arrow,” and I think 1 should lack humor, indeed, if I let the occasion slide, and did not put your name in the fly-leaf of the only book of mine that you have never read—and never will.”

Among 250 candidates for the post of master of the Birmingham Workhouse Infirmary was a market gardener. This gentleman stated that he was a graduate of the Edinburgh University, has taken a medical degree, and was at one time a minister of the Church of Scotland. A gardener, graduate, medico, and minister com bined ought to add up into a good master of a workhouse.

An Englishman named Greenwood has met his death under most remarkable circumstances. He made a bet that be would stay under water longer than anybody in Hereford without being drowned. He swam out into the river and disappeared, while his friends on the banks held their watches to time him. When he had beaten the record they became alarmed and went after him, and dragged out his lifeless body. He had won the wager in one sense, for the doctors decided that he had not been actually drowned, but that death had resulted from the sudden immersion after a heavy meal. An Inspector of Nuisances of the Faniiary Authority of the Port of Loudon brought within the precincts of the West Ham Police, on August 20th, 1363 tins of meat, consisting of beef, mutton, and rabbit, which had been selected from the cargoes brought to London from New Zealand in the ships Aorangi and Tongariro. About 20 per cent, of the tins were found to be unwholesome, as the result of ten days’ examination, and the putrid tins were brought for condemoation. The Magistrate had some of the tine opened, and, being satisfied with the nature of their contents, he ordered them to be destroyed.