Miscellaneous.

Waipukurau Press, Issue 296, 15 August 1908, Page 3

Miscellaneous.

o Two of Raisnli’s chiefs, who played a leading- part in the kidnapping of Kaid McLean, have accepted an engagement to tour with a circus in the United States. Miss Clara Clemens, the daughter of Mark Twain, recently made her debut as a singer in Britain. Asked why her father had not come with her, Miss Clemens replied, “Well, you see, he accompanied me in America for about two years, and I found that he was so anxious to get up on the platform before I had finished, and make a speech, and the people seemed so impatient to hear him, I guessed if. I didn’t want to ruin my career he’d better stay at home.”

The German Emperor, sa.vs a contributor to “St. James’Budget.” had a very high opinion of the late Cecil Rhodes. “I wish you were a German,” His Majesty once said to the great Englishman, “foil’d appoint you director of my foreign affairs.” “Thar,” said Rhodes, “is a great compliment, but I respectfully assure yon that if you had been an Englishman I should have engaged you as mv general managar.”

A sailor on the Elcano, one of the little American gunboats on duty in the Philippines, will have to be retired from the service as a result of a curious accident. As asmall boat belonging to the Elcano was being rowed out to the ship in Manila harbour the plug’ in the bottom of the boat came out. To prevent the boat from being swamped a sailor put his fing-er through the hole, and the finger was immediately bitten off by a fish as cleanly as if amputated by a surgeon. As it was the sailor’s ■forefinger, which he needs to pull the trigger of his rifle, he will have to be retired because unable to perform his duties.

An amusing incident is reported from Goulbnrn in connection with a> parachute descent there the other da\-, The balloon ascent was from the Agricultural Society’s grounds, the weather being stormy. Some two miles out a man was eng’aged m cutting wood in the bush, and as ho happened to look up lie saw the parachutist descending in close proximity to him, Evidently he had heard nothing of the proposed ascent, and, being- thorough' scared he dropped his axe and fled for his life half a mile to the nearest dwelling, where he astonished the residents with the news that the end of the world had come. The aeronaut landed in a tree, after a very stormy passage, from a height of some 6000 or 7000 feet, but without sustaining more injury than a few bruises.

A telegram from Charolles, a. small town thirty miles from Macon, France, recently reported that the neighbourhood had been visited by a shower of sulphur. The roofs, gardens, fields, vineyards, rivers and ponds were covered with a yellow dust, and for some time the peasants in the fields were troubled by a sulphurous, biting odour which made breathing difficult. Several scientists at Lyons have concluded that the sulphur shower is due to the renewed eruption of Mount V e.suvius.

Nature (says “ St. James’s Budget ”) is conspiring with man in Switzerland to spoil the place for our descendants a thousand years hence. Man supplies funicular railways up the mountains (we rejoice to see that the movement against the Matterhorn railway is gaining strength nature is dissolving the glaciers, for some reason known to herself'and nobody else. The great Alcsch glacier is shrinking nearly fifty feet a year, leaving in the place of its lustrous green depths an unsightly collection of boulders. Now and then a glacier gives up its dead, as in the case of the Italian guide Nagi, who fell into a crevasse on Monte Rosa in 1877, and -was recovered in a perfect state three years ago. The possibility of reappearance may be some consolation for the tourist who finds himself suddenly at the bottom of a crevasse, but the ordinary may who stays above ground would like to see glaciers more of a permanency.