The Latest Craze.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume IX, Issue 2961, 27 July 1888, Page 2

The Latest Craze.

t Entertainments by the American s whistling lady, Mrs Shaw, are now ) being given in London drawing rooms, , The musical executant has at comi maud a repertoire of forty composii tions, much of it good music, arid' ; somo of it specially written for her; . She has already, it is said, whistled i belore tho Prince of Wales, and with ■ concert engagemau ta constantly booked ; and seeing many grand people, 1 she : "thinks London too delightful for anything." Her range in whistle is over two octaves and a half. This is , how the correspondent of the Paris ■ edition of the New York Herald dea- ■ cribes a whistling interlude, where lie seems to havo been a highly gratified 1 listener:—" Now tho notes burst forth gaily like the laugh of a bobolink and again they sink away soft as tho evening's breeze. She produces a ' tone which would rise clear and steady ■ abovo an orchestra, and with equal ease sustains her upper B flat so gontly that one almost loses the sound. Trills, high notes and low, every trick that is known to the throat of a bird or tho voice of a prima donna, this wonderful whistlor can imitate'on her lips." To a Pall Mall Gazette interviewer, she said that she was a De-. troiter, and bad lived among musicians all her life, When she was ten months old she whistled instead , of crying, and when she had children of her own, she whistled them to sleep with sweet lullabys. About a year ago, Mrs Shaw determined to put her gift to somo useful purpose, and went into training with a musical profe.""T. Whistling by oar was oil for domestic music, but for the con-cert-hall and tbe evening party every note had to be rendered correctly to be effective. One of the great difficulties.which Mrs Shaw had to contend with at first was the tendency of her audience to laugh at such an odd entertainment, but any tendeiicy of : that sort vanished after a few bars from that wonderful labial oroliostra. ' He asked Mrs Shaw if ladies could : learn to whistle, and understood her to say that tbe art would be difficult > of acquirement without some natural ■ gift. The advice she gives to aspirants is, " never prepare to pucker," by which she moans that the lips must fall into their note-producing position quite easily and. naturally. Mrs Shaw never whistles on ail empty stomach, and never takes stimulants. Her lips seldom get' out of order,. but a little, wiiid or evon draught dries them, aud makes heu raasiodiffioult, rHfe

Potato Growing. At the Wisconsin experimental station, trials were recently made with ■:yi 70 ,varieties of potatoes, some of wliidi 1 , fluoli as early rose, regents, cliampion, ? white elephant, miignum bonmn &c., aro known in England. A vnrioty . called Cook's superb, was first, with ■ a crop of 188 bushels of largo, and til bushels of small potatoes per aero. Wuto elephants gave U7 bushels of , t , large and CI bushels of small potatoes, j * wlnlo champions gave 15 bushels of largo and 41 bushels of small potatoes. 1 yield, Ex periments wereareo made as to tlio manner of planting potatoeswith respect to tho seed, as follows:—1. With large V seed Laving all tlio eyes cut out but ! one. 2, With large seed cut in parts Stwo eyes each. 8. With small glanted whole. Tho results wero liii favor of tlio first manner of '; planting, that is, with largo seed havinMtL.tho.oycs cut out but one. In tho else of the variety of potato called Chicago, tho first manner yiolded GO , por cent, more than tho second, and 100 por cent, moro than the third manner, This is a vexed question in England, and should be decided by experiments like those in Wisconsin.