NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 102, 10 April 1875, Page 12

NEWS IN BRIEF.

There are 14 priests, 8 churches, 49 chapels, 1 convent and several echools for the Indians in the District of New Westminster, British Columbia. These missions are under the care of the Oblate Fathers, who have been very successful among the red men. Pistols were first used by the cavalry of England in 1544. The Michigan census shows an excess of males of 60,215, or 1,095 to every 1,000 females. , Mr. Tennyson is to be a made Baronet. The Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath has been offered to Mr Carlyle. It is said in France that the quarries of lithographic stone in Bavaria are exhausted as regards the best kind, and that the only fine atones are now obtained by the Paris lithographers from Bruniquel, Tarn, and Garronne, in Prance. These stones are said to be well appreciated in the United States of America. There are quarries of the same stone also at Yigan in France, but these are of an inferior description. > A Sevres jardiniere fetched as much as much as £6,000 at a recent sale at Christie's Auction Booms. ' ' Two daughters of Hole-in-the-day, the noted Chippewa Indian chief, of Minnesota, are being educated under the kind, care of the Sisters of Notre Dame, Milwaukee. The girls are intelligent, and are making a fair degree of progress. A private of the Black Watch has succeeded in bringing home safely a number of Ashantee poultry. Boman type is gradually displacing German in German-speak-ing countries. An Italian architect mentions having seen at St. Nicholas, in Lorraine, a single plank of the Wood of the Walnut, 25 feet -wide upon which the Emperor Frederick HI. had given a sumptuous banquet. In the Baidar Valley, near Balaklava, in the Crimea,, stands a walnut tree at least I,ooo'years old. It yields annually from 80,000 to 100,000 nuts, and belongs to five Tartar families; who share its produce annually. The Bishop of Bodez, one of the poorest dioceses of France, is at present in Borne and- has presented his Holiness with the sum' of 140,000 francs, an offering from his flock which although not over blessed with this world's goods, possesses, in an' unusual', degree, love and reverence for .the Holy See. .^ ■ . A notorious Spanish brigand, who is charged "with upwards of thirty assassinations, has 1 been captured in Algeria, and shipped for 1 Spain. - , , > . , .■; '.>. »••:■:..-'■ =■ ' ' • •' ' : , -The colored people of Alabama own about £2;000,000 worth oo f property. ' , ; *. „ .;, ■__■-''• > '* • ' v f "> -'t

Twenty-nine new operas have been produced in Italy in the course of last year. Of these only five were successes. The others proved sheer rubbish. Not a drop of rain has fallen in the Crimea for four months ; all the surface of the earth is a moveable mass of dust, and no winter wheat is yet sown. The brewers of Melbourne have been considerably " exercised " by some strictures upon the colonial beer of that city, and they have memorialised the Government to appoint a competent perniament inspector, pledging themselves to pay his salary. „ Private letters from America announce that the proprietors of the Great Eastern are engaged discussing a most extraordinary proposal. The great ship, it is said, is to be anchored in Philadelphia harbor during the Centennial Exhibition, and to be made a great floating hotel, where 5000 persons can be comfortably accommodated. The Charleston 'Herald' complains of the withdrawal of advertisements from that paper by publicans in the township, because the members of the ' Herald's ' staff are teetotallers.