TOPICAL READING.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8331, 14 January 1907, Page 4

TOPICAL READING.

On the emigration question, the London Morning Advertiser writes: —"We do not want men or women who can make themselves useful here to emigrate. There is no place in the colonies for those who cannot make themselves useful there. There are, of course, those who cannot find congenial scope for the use of their faculties here, and yet can find it in the colonies. Those are the people who should be and will be assisted to emigrate! But the problem of the unemployed is concerned with a far larger number of persons who can neither make themselves sufficiently useful at home nor would be able to do so in another country. These emigration cannot help, and what can be done for them must be done at home."

People who are interested in the •'characters of Dickens—and their name is still legion—will be glad to know that the original of "Little Dorrit" is still alive, and opened a sale of work in Islington (London) quite recently. Mrs Mary Ann Cooper, the lady in question, celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday in November at Soutbgate.. She lives [ with friends, having been a widow for over twenty years, and her rooms contain some precious mementoes of Charles Dickens.' "My Charles" she still calls him, for there is not the slightest doubt that the now old, old lady took more than a-sentimental interest in the great novelist. They were boy and girl together. They shared a community of interests; she recollects many of the types made immortal by Dickens, end has told many a new Dickens' story that may yet some day receive the light of publication.

Mr William Holman-Hunt may truly be called the grand, old man of art. This year he will be eighty,, and it is sixty years since he ; exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy. His two colleagues of the famous pre-Raphaelite movement, namely, Sir J. E. Millais and Sir Edward Burne-Jones, have both been dead some years, but he flourishes, still hale, in a green old age. There is a great moral quality, an intense spirituality stamped on his face. It is the great head, the abundant silvery hair, and flowing beard, the broad forehead, the piercing blue eyes of a Hebrew prophet. The sad story of his early struggles in uncongenial clerk's work is illumined by at. least one amusing incident. At the age of sixteen he became assistant to a firm of calico-printers, whose office windows were of ground glass. On these the young clerk drew flies of such marvellous fidelity that his employer was completely' taken in. "I can't make it out," he said, irritably; "the more I brush them away the more those wretched flies seem to come in!" What a curious anticipation of the artists' future greatness in the exquisite elaboration of detail—that conscientiousness which made him spend, for instance, twelve years over "The Lady of Shalott." His most famous picture is undoubtedly "The Light of the World."

The latest official returns regarding plague in India show that the scourge

is now much heavier than it was during a similar period in 1905. Taking a week each in October and November last, it is seen that during the seven days ended October 20th there were 7,426 cases and 6,216 deaths. For a similar week in 1905 the cases came to 4,407, and the deaths to 3,336. In the week ended November 17th last there were recorded 6,474 cases and 4,924 deaths, while for the same week in the previous year the cases came to 3,695 and the deaths to 2,826. Plague is usually heavier in April than in other months. The number falls to, comparatively small dimensions in July. In 1906 the cases and deaths during that month were below a thousand each week, and in the previous year below two thousand. According to the report of the Indian Sanitary Commissioners for 1904 the number of deaths due to plague in India from the commencement of the outbreak in the autumn of 1896 to the end of 1904 reached the appalling total of 3,263,810, of which 2,609,551 occurred in the British provinces, and 645,259 in the Native States. In 1904 the mortality from plague reached the huge total of 938,010.