Miscellaneous.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1851, 17 May 1884, Page 2 (Supplement)

Miscellaneous.

Stuychniv, the active principle of the nux vomica bean, which has become famous in the annals of criminal poisoning, is so intensely bitter that it will impart a sensibly bitter taste to six hundred thousand times its weight of water.

Thk little house in Baker-street, London wherein Bulwer was born, has beoome a milliner's shop. The novelist, who looked younger than he v/as, nourished his natural vanity in this particular by ignoring the year of his birth. He never cared to know it, his son declares, in his preface to the forthcoming autobiography. "IE some curious Impertinents," Bulwer himself says, " are anxious to know in what year o£ the Lord that event took place, let them find out for themselyea." And when questioned on the matter, he would answer, with a laugh, "It is a Cretan myßtery." After this fashion the veteran dandy maintained, without direct assertion, the pleasant fiction of youth.

The Solitude of Servants. Say you are- a well-to-do tradesman or mechanic, you can afford to employ a servant to make life easier for your wife. Well, that servant lives alone. Your wife and yourself discourage "followers." You don't like her to have too much company of either sex in the kitchen. Your wife cannot associate with her. The kitchen is her sitting-room ; the smallest and most remote room . in the house is her bedroom. From six a.m. until nine p.m., or earlier and later, may be, are her hours of work. In all that time she speaks when she is spoken to, when there are orders for her, just as convicts are allowed to speak in a penitentiary. Well, now, the lonely creature in the kitchen is a woman, Do you wonder she wants to go to the jolly butcher and the grocer's boy for a little gossip ? Do you wonder that she flirts with the policeman ? Do you wonder that when she goes to the ball she stays until some time the next day ? She sits down three times a day and eats her meals in solitude, bo utterly alone that she can hear herself swallow. I wonder that she doesn't go mad. The man who works at the lowest occupation has an easier time than that. The man who cleans the street has company of his own class. He eats his dinner with his fellow - laborers. The rag-picker meets rival rag-pickers every day. I do not wonder the house-servant stipulates for company and evenings out.

Make a Beginning. Eemembeb in all things that if you do not begiiryou will never come to an end. The first weed pulled up in the garden, the first seed in the ground, the first shilling put in the savings bank, and the first mile travelled on a journey are all important things ; they make a beginning, and thereby a hope, a promise, a pledge, an assurance that you are in, earnest in what you have undertaken. How many a poor, idle, hesitating outcast is now creeping and crawling on his way through

the world who might have held up his head and prospered, if, instead of putting off his resolution of industry and amendment, he had only made a beginning !