THE GRAND DUKE THIEF.

Waikato Times, Volume VIII, Issue 456, 20 April 1875, Page 2

THE GRAND DUKE THIEF.

The " deuoumenf'ofthe said story of the Grand Duke Nicholas CoustantinDvitch bas not been long delayed. Your readers will remember that the visit of the Czar to London last year was troubled by distressing family news, and that it became generally known that his nephew had been arrested for stealing diamonds from his mother, who had unconsciously betrayed her son to the police by calling for their aid in discovering the mystery of the continued thefts which were exhausting her jewel-box. All the scandalous details of the yong man's conduct became publicly known. He was placed under arrest, and the lady who benefited by his thefts was banished from St. Petersburg. The Grand Duke's conduct in other respects had been reprehensible, but he was held to have redeemed himself in public opinion by his conduct during the expedition to Khiva, which he accompanied at his own request. If your readers are acquainted with Mr MacGahan's " Campaigning on the Oxus " — as I hope for their own sakes they are — they will remember in what high terms that gentleman mentions the Grand Duke Nicholas as an energetic and intelligent officer, and, generally speaking, a good fellow. His turning thief, with .£30,000 a year of private incoine, astonished everybody ; and now the world is told that he is mad. During his imprisonment no one but his father and his physicians ■were permitted tosee him, and on the return of the Emperor from the Crimea, a few weeks ago, they presented a report which declared the Grand Duke to the insane. Tha fact has been promulgated by a " ukase," and the patient has been removed, under medical superintendence, and to the deep grief of his parents, from St. Petersburg. Nobody knows where he is at present, but it is supposed he will b« permitted toreside in the Crimea, and ultimately to escape to a foreign country. No one belives in his insanity ; there have been criminals who were not lunatics in the Romanoff family before now, and ita annals are peculiarly scandalous, far beyond the most acid imaginations of a Greville, and th« general belief is that the Grand Duke will make his appearance in one of the European capitals, under another name, before long, and be not Ul received. " Apropos "of di* raonds and thieves, no intelligence of Lady Dudley V jewels has reaohsd th« police, and the Countess de Morella has just lost £1,000 worth of jewellery, stolen from her dressing-table, just as J4ady Waldegrave's jewels were stolen two years ago. — " Austraiiasan."

When are wtdien likj fiih in embryo ?— Wnon thej »re aU in anm (roe). " ' -'. * -

The promiscuous kissing of children is a pestilent practice. We use the word advisedly, and it is mild for the occasion. Murderous would he the projier word, did the kissers know the mischief they do. Yes, madam, murderous ; and we are speaking to you. D) you remember calling on your dear friend, Mrs Brown, the other day, with a strip of flannel round your neck 1 and when little Flora came dancing into the room didn't you pounce upon her demonstratively, call her a pretty little pet and ki^s her? Then you serenely proceeded to describe the dreadful sore throat that kept you from prayer meeting the night before. You had no designs on the dear child's health, we know ; nevertheless, you killed her — killed her as surely as if you had fel her with strychnine or arsenic. Your carafes were fatal. Two or three days after the little pet began to complain of a sore throat too. The symptoms giew rapidly alarming, and when the doctor came the single word diptheria sufficed to explain them all. To-day a little mound in Greenwood is the sole momento of your visit. Of course the mother does not suspect, and would not dare to suspect, you of any instrumentality in her bereavement. She charges it to a mysterious Providence. The doctor says nothing to disturb the delusion i that would be impolitic, if not cruel ; but*. to an outsider he is free to say that the child's deatll was due directly to your infernal stupility. These are precisely his words ; more forcible than elegant, it I is true, but who shall say, under the circumstances, that they are not justifiable ? Remember " Evil is wrought by want of thought As well as by want of heart." It would be hard to tell how much of the prevalent sickness and mortality from diphtheria is due to such want of thought. As a rule, adults have the disease in so mild a form that they mistake it for a simple cold ; and as a cold is not contagious, they think nothing of exposing others to their breath or to the greater danger of labial contact. Taking into consideration the well-established fact, that diphtheria is nsually, if not always, communicated by the direct transplanting of the malignant vegetation which causes the disease, the fact that there can be no more certain means of bringing tfi^. contagion to its favorite soil than the act of kissing, and the further tact that the custom of kissing children on all occasions is all but universal, it is not surprising that, when the disease is once* imported into a community, it is very likely to become ' epidemic. It would be absurd to charge the spread of diphtheria entirely to the practice of child-kissing. There are other modes of propagation, though it is hard to conceive of any more directly suited to the spread of the infection or more general in its operation. It stands to diphtheria about the same relation that promiscuons hand shaking formerly did to the itch. It were better to avoid the practice. The children will not suffer if they go vnkissed ; and their friends ought for their sake to forego the luxury for a season. A single kiss has been known to infect a family ; and the most careful may be in condition to communicate the disease without knowing it. Beware, then, of playing Judas, and let the babies alone. — " Scientific American."