MISCELLANEOUS.

Tuapeka Times, Volume V, Issue 231, 4 July 1872, Page 9

MISCELLANEOUS.

We commend the following excellent rules, from a New York newspaper, to our occasional correspondents, and trust sincerely they will be taken to heart : — Do oblige us by omitting all such flourishes as " your interesting and valuable paper," " your able and patriotic course," &c. Our subscribers know all about that sort of thing, and we have also a tolerable opinion of ourselves. If you think by this to improve your chance of insertion, you ai'e ruinously mistaken. When you have written all you have to say, run it over, and see if there are not some sentences that could be spared without serious injury ; if there are, out with them. We are often compelled to decline good articles because we cannot make room for them. Half a column has ten chances when two columns have one, and three columns none. Try to discourage us as little as possible ; and if you must condemn, let your facts be stronger than your words. When you assail any person or cause, always give us your real name, which shall only be given to those who have a right to demand it. He is a coward who would ask us to bear the responsibility of others. If you send us word that you " have no time to orrect, and have written in baste," we shall put your manuscript into tl c fire. Why should you throw upon us the task of correcting your scrawl when we are obliged to slight our own work for want of time ? Give us facts, incidents, aud occurrences at the earliest moment, and we shall be grateful, though you wrote them with a pudding-stick ; ,but if you attempt logic or sentiment do it upright instead of leaning on us.

The " Bendigo Independent " of the Ist inst. says : —Private letters from London, received by the mail this morning, informs us of a scandal which has shocked May Fair and Belgravia even to a greater degree than Mr. Chaffer's revelations of the inner life of the late Vicar-General. Prince Teck, the husband of the Princess Mary of Cambridge, has deserted the family roof, and taken up his quarters at Venice, with the Countess Zichy, a sister of Prince Metternich, whose society, it appears, he prefers to that of the lady to whom he is legally attached. The result of this sensational flight will be to leave the children of the disunited pair a charge on the nation; but unfortunate as this is, worse is the blow to the pious holders of May Meetings ; Exeter- Hall, alas, will know him no more, and the reveiend gentleman who once expatiated so loudly on the grace with which he presided at their discussions can now only take refuge in deploring the " immorality in higher places." The " Eecord," the special chronicler of the levanting prince's evangelical virtues, has been sorely affected by this un-looked-for fall.

Mr. Spurgeon, speaking at the Metropolitan Tabernacle of the condition of the farm-laborer, said that it often happened that the clergyman in a country district knew as much about the Gospel as a ploughman did about medicine. If a poor man went to a dissenting place of worship, probably he got mentioned to the squire or his employer, and he was told that he must not do anything of the sort. At all events, if he was not directly told, be learned it when Christmas, strongly flavored with the Thirty-nine Articles and the Catechism, came round. He got nothing himself, and his wife went without the blanket in the cold. Dissenters had also to contend with another difficulty. Even if the villages were perfectly free they could not support a pastor. Support a pastor, poor souls! they could not support themselves. The condition of our agricultural laborers, Mr. SpurgeoiT said, was most shameful, and he had not rejoiced in anything since he was born so much as when he heard they had begun to stir and to strike. He wondered they had not struck long ago. No doubt if wages were raised, farmers would complain they were pinched. Well, the farmers must pinch the landlords. He (Mr. Spurgeon) had not a great deal of sympathy for the latter, for there were numbers who had their thousands of acres, and who could stand a little squeezing without being reduced to abject poverty thereby. Negro slavery was nothing to the treatment of the laborers, aud it ought to be denounced by every honest man and earnest tongue.

Archdeacon Denison, in his charge to the clergy at Tauntou, expressed his conviction that disestablish ment and disendowment were not far distant, but as the essence of the Church was being gradually destroyed by compromises', he felt no regret at the prospect. In the front page of a recent number of the " Irish Times " we find the following advertisement: — " Public advertisement. Adulteration of milk. At the Northern Police Court on Saturday, the 17th February, 1872, John Doyle, dairyman, of 127, Dorset-s treet was fined £5 for selling milk adulterated with 50 per ceut. of water, and, it being his second conviction for a similar offence, the publication of this ad-

vertisement was ordered by the magistrate who heard the case. In addition to the above penalty, cost of advertisement to be defrayed by the said John Doyle." A Scotchman, observing that the once white linen of one of his employees had, through long absence of soap and water, become a hazy black, inquired, as a prelude to a homily on cleanliness, how often his shirt was washed. " Once a month," was the reply. " "Why, I require two shirts a week." " Twa sarks in a week !" ejaculated Eobbie I " ye maun be a dirty deevil !" Chief Justice Nicholson, of Tennessee, has decided that a man who reads the papers is incompetent to act as a juror, though willing to give a verdict according to the testimony. Tennessee will not soon overtake the other States in the race of progress if such old fogies are to be the leaders. A fine picture of "Boston is given by Wendell Philips in one of his recent lectures on labour reform : " Boston is a city in which every tenth person is a criminal and every seventh a pauper, three-quarters of our farms are mortgaged for drinks : two-thirds of the pulpits are filled with drunkards ; and the bench of justice is nearly vacant because one-half of the judges have died drunkards." Great and marvellous is the ingenuity of man, and many and beneficent the uses of his inventions. The last of the great many hundreds of thousands of patents granted at Washington was for an improvement in chignons. What new deformity has been given to this hairy monster we are not accurately informed, but we await its appearance on our public promenades with a feeling of dread. A New Haven physician has discovered a successful way of silencing the clamours of his landlord. When that grasping personage calls for the payment of rent, the doctor quietly shows him a skeleton in an inner room, and tells him " That man came here just two weeks aero with a bill." This is regarded as equivalent to a settlement in full. A women who had emigrated from New Brunswick went before a Judge at Houlton, Maine, and renounced her allegiance to the Queen of England, and declared her^intention of becoming a citizen of the United States. We believe this case is without a precedent and when she takes out her final papers the test will come whether citizenship confers on her the right to vote. Tobacco-cancers on the lip and tongue are increasing so alarmingly as to greatly diminish pipe smoking in Germany. This deadly form of cancer is incurable. In our country we have a few fearful examples. President Stirling, of the Burlington Bank, N.J., clerk of C. Dodge & Co., Bankers of Philadelphia, and a physician of Sonoma, California, fell victims to tobacco cancer of the mouth. The great unwashed will no longer have an excuse for the dirt they carry. A mine of soap has been discovered in New Mexico, that after using leaves the skin as soft and smooth as that of anew borne babe, with the odor of otto of roses. As the mine is located on the line of a railway, arrangements have been made to forward enough soap to New York to cleanse it of its outward corruption,