MISCELLANEOUS.

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 383, 27 October 1874, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

Professor Tyndall announces that he has produced a machine warranted to give the loudest and most hideous noise ever heard on this mortal earth. He calls his engine a " Syren." The Syren is worked by steam, and is intended to be placed at dangerous points on the coast to warn sailors, by its constant howls during foggy weather, of the danger at hand. The people of South Foreland have heard it constantly of late, and seemed to have reconciled themselves to it. Professor Tyndall has made a great number of experiments with i-egard to the travelling of sound in dense weather, and finds, contrary to what is generally received, neither fog, rain, hail, or snow interferes with the transmission of sound. " Some of our days of densest acoustic capacity have (he says) been marvellously clear optically." Besides his bellowing engine described by himself as " the most powerfal instrument ever tried in England," Dr Tyndall recommends the use of guns. He has not yet discovered that any signal could be obtained which, under any circumstances, would be heard as far as four miles— that was the condition required by Dr Robinson — and therefore warns sailors that they must, when they hear a warning, look out for danger within two or three miles ; but he believes his invention wiUln a few years save property far exceeding in value the cost of establishing the signals. A Tokomairiro farmer brought up near London, Canada West, states to the Btuee Herald that the ashes of the mapu, manuka, kauri, black pine, and other woods, are worth Is 6d a bag to farmers complaining of sorrel, sour soil, stiff clays, <fee., besides giving farmers' wives the means of making plenty of soft soap. The Otago Witness says: — "Another cargo of railway sleepers of questionable quality — the produce of the pine forests of Vancouver's Island — arrived the other day in the barque Colusa. "We have it on good authority that such timber is never used by our American cousins for railway sleepers, the wood being too light and unenduring, and is moreover particularly susceptible to the evil influence of watei*. It very soon rots away in damp ground. We should like to be informed why material that is rejected in America should be considered good enough for New Zealand ? There is plenty of very much better timber in New Zealand for the purpose, to which these yellow pine sleepers are to be applied, and if these are not sufficiently durable there is an inexhaustible supply to draw upon in the forests of Australia. It is to be hoped that nastiness is not t) be introduced in the construction of our grand railway system, especially as there is not the slightest peculiarity of it being accompanied by the usual cheapness as a set off." A Nelson writer complains that the farmers cannot get a remunerative market for their hops, although they are producing first-class samples. He says :—": — " Here are men with many hundreds of pounds' worth of hops lying on their hands who could and would, did they meet with a little encouragement, very speedily be producers of the article to the value of thousands instead of hundreds sterling, and yet are compelled to abandon an industry, the pursuit of which would be remunerative to them as well as profitable to the colony, because they cannot find business men to assist them by pushing their produce into the world's markets." The Press correspondent writes : — I must give you a dash of romance in real life. Amongst the mairiage announcements in the English papeis you will receive by this mail, your eye may possibly be caught by a curious one under the following heading: — "Smith — Esmeralda." The tormer name may not be altogether unfamiliar to your readeis ; the latter is not so often mefc out of tho pages of a novel. The announcement., »ft«r giving the pl*ce

ai-i date of the happy ceremony, runs thus romantically :— " Hubert Smith, Esq., author of * Tent Life with English Gipsies in Norway,' to Esmeralda, the heroine of his book." Hereby hangs a tale. Mr Hubert Smith is the lord of man) bioad acres in this country, and on a wild portion of his eßtate a tribe of gipsies encamped some time ago. He does not appear to have given his visitors that reception generally accorded to their class by gentlemen of property ; but, on the contrary, encouraged them, and eventually took a party of them, with come tents and a couple of donkeys, for a trip in Norway. Among the party was a beauteous gipsy maiden, the daughter of the head of the tribe, who figures very often in the pages of the book desciibing the trip. This is the charming Esmeralda of the above announcement. The following episode of colonial life is extracted from a letter written by Mr Holloway to the Laboweis 1 Union Chronicle :— -" Here is another instance of success. Almost adjoining the Chalmers land I came across a Mr Joseph Hunt, formerly of Great Rollright, in my own county of Oxfordshire. He told me he was working in that village for 8s a . wee k — house rent to pay and a wife and three children to support out of that. He had heard of New Zealand^ and Joe thought within himself that he could'nt worse his position by removing to another locality. He talked the matter over with his wife, and the result was, he made up his mind to emigrate to New Zealand, to leave the munificent sum of eight bob a-week, and the glorious prospect of having a mansion rent-free provided for him when he got too old to work; to leave that glorious old country laudedas the abode of" the free and the happy, but which has the reputation of degrading the thousands of the tillers of her soil, and keeping them bound down in serfdom and slavery, as galling as was ever felt by slaves in a West India plantation, or in the Southern States of America. Joe bigan to think over these things, and he determined to cast off these shackles, to brave the dangers of the ocean, and to seek far away from his own native home, in some more favoured clime, a home where he could provide for his wite and family the necessaries, if not the comforts of life. In the year 1856 he bade farewell to Old England, and after a long voyage he landed safely in New Zealand, with 2£d in his pocket, with which lie began life afresh in the colony. He Set to work in real good earnest, and being a sober, energetic, .and persevering man, determined to get on if possible. |He succeeded beyond his sanguine expectations ; and to-day I had the pleasure of visiting him in his own freehold house, which he has erected upon his own freehold farm of 210 acres. He has given his children a good education, and I thought within myself, as I sat with my friend at the tea-table, what would have been Joseph's prospects, had he remained an agricultural labourer in Great Rollright, in England 1 In all probability he would have been over head and ears in the baker's and grocer's debt, without any probability of paying it; with the Chipping Norton' Union staring him hard in the face, and the prospect of being buried in a pauper's grave. This is only one or two cases which I have noted down in my diary of the marked success which has almost invariably followed the efforts of industrious, persevering men; they are not solitary cases." A comical breach of promise case was heard recently before the Court of Common Pleas, (says a writer in the Otago Times,) which appears to have .given rise to considerable merriment among the spectators. Its peculiarity consisted in the usual position of affairs being reversed, the gentleman toeing the plaintiff, and the lady the defendant. The plaintiff was a commercial traveller named Priest, n siding in Birmingham, and the defendant was a Miss Godden, who resided in Devonshire. From the letters read in Court it appeared that the lady was at first warm in her attachment, even going so far as to s : gn herself " Your darling wife ; " but «fter her father came into considerable property her flection cooled, though she refused to accede to a proposal made to her by the plaintiff that the match should be broken off, in consequence of the disparity of their circumstances. Her subsequent refusal, however, to fulfil her engagement, was declared by plaintiff to have seriously affected his health, and his cross-examination on this point was very amusing. But the most amusing remark of all was made by the lady's father, who convulsed the Court by saying that his daughter was not strong enough to be manned, and that " she was only half a child; she was a twin." The laughter of the spectators was l'enewed when the Judge (Lord Coleridge) Slid that "he could hardly agree that a twin was ' half a child.' " In summing up the Judge somewhat pointedly said that " there were many things which a man had a legal right to do that it would be by no means right he should do," and this remark greatly influenced the jury in their decision, which was that the plaintiff was entitled to receive one farthing as damages. Two Mormon farmers are neighbours in the south eastern part of the city, near the Penitentiary. In the family of one is a daughter, aged 15, a pretty English girl, with the rosy beauty of her native land in a sweet and guileless face. He father is a polygamist, and often told his daughter that the system, nJsrhich tears mothers' hearts to pieces, is, after all, but a Cross of Salvation. This the maiden would not believe. The other farrnei', also one of the plurality class, and an Englishman too, courts the fdghbour's child. She, so young and comely, would ake a charming substitute for the good old and •wrinkled woman who had crossed the seas wich him. Accordingly, the two men met for a business tutlk. At first, the girl's father said that he expected Elder , one of the Twelve Apostles, wanted her, but finally concluded to give up thinking so. These neighbours, each one fitty years of age, then agreed to the terms of a bargain, by which the damsel was sold by her own father to the hoary lecher, the price being a span of work mules. The ceremony, which is to complete the transfer of that girl to her owner, will take place in the Endowment on next » Monday. A child's hope, virtue and happiness, are to be sacrificed on the altar. Daniel H. Wells, Mayor of Salt Lake City, is to be the executioner in this moral tragedy, The slavery of former days sold negroes At a public -auction block, but in Utah the " Churct of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints " robs tho cradle, and finds victims for its hellish traffic Yet, when these horrible things are published, the demons who do them cry out," Persecution ! Persecution ! "