TOPICS of the DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXVI, Issue 276, 18 November 1905, Page 9

TOPICS of the DAY.

(From Onr Special Correspondent.) LONDON, October 6. A HUB AND CRY. The absorbing topic of the Londoners at present is the Merstham Tunnel crime. Nearly a fortnight, has elapsed since the tragedy occurred, and as the murderer still remains at large ths half-penny papers are in their element as crime investigators. Columns of theories and rumours are served up and contradicted three or four times a day, and when the "Star's" bill came out with "All the clues" instead of *he usual '"'All the winners,"' it was evident that even racing news for the timebeing was compelled to take second place in public interest. Whatever the issue of the mystery, whether there be a murderer or not, the affair will be memorable for the extraordinary amount of attention it has attracted. I am told the editorial wastcpaper baskets overflow nightly with amazing contributions from amateur journalist-de-tectives, all, in their own opinion, hot upon the scent. Some of the theories that do get printed are wild enough, and the various versions of this due or that are sometimes delightfully contradictory. The whole country is in a state of hue and cry, but if you attempt to follow the links in the chain as forged by the special correspondents, you soon find yourself tangled tip in a web. which Sherlock Holmes himself would despair of unravelling. One paper announced positively, and.witk much cireinn&tantial detail, that the railway esoriage in which Miss Mosey travelled

to hffr doem had hewn identrfted, and a graphic deseriptira of the dark bloodstains on the door stmt thTillß down the backbonds of a million excited readers. All the other papers promptly eombintd to squelch the report as totally untrue —to put it mildly. Anather erening journal reports that a man ton* (been arrested on suspicion, and one* more the rival organs turn upon and (rend the offending. "YELLOW PRESS." If we bslieved everything the papers tell us about the man who is wanted, we must picture an individual whose height is sometimes 4ft 9m and someI times sft lOin, whose eyes _t» light I blue and also dark piercing, face pale land ruddy, manner nervour and eoofii dent, clothing stylish and plebeian. He J lives at Clapham Junction, Redbill Jiei- ! gate, Tonbrldge Wells, and half a dosjen other widely-eeparated localities j and has been seen in most of these j places in the course of a single evening. JFrom which it will be gathered that the i suspect, whoever he may be, is a very | remarkable man, and even if the newspapers are the great help to the police that they o modestly claim to be, the latter have no easy task in running the murderer to earth. Just how the matter stands at present the public do not know. My "Evening News" tells mc I that the police are at the end of their half-a-dozen suspects have 'been examined, and one of them detainI ed, but one and all have been - able I satisfactorily to clear themselves, so | that the detectives do- not know which j way to turn next. On the other hand | the "Star" assures mc that the police j have their eye on a Clapham map who is missing from bis home, and that his arrest is momentarily expected. - Both these authorities assure mc that their .information is absolutely correct, and j. nor doubt thepolice. have implicit faith in' both. Scotland Yard must feel grateful for the information placed at their disposal for the modest stnn of on* half-penny. < -..."; v

THE " T - K — IBJ__3 TTTRK. " ON TOP In view of the return match between your recent visitor, Georges Haeken- j Hchmidt, and Ahmed Madrali. which is to take plate presently, I went to the Lyceum—Henry living's xoarious old ; houeo degenerated into a. music-hall!—j . last Monday to see the "Terrible Turk" perform against the- Yankee wrestler, Tom Jenkins, in tbe catcb-as-ca toucan style. ''From information receiv- ] ed," as the police say, I went doubting whether it was a genuine money match, but my doubts were speedily removed and replaced by disappointment. Whatever Jenkins may have been in the days past he is to-day no match lor All—ed Madrali. The Turk is a big man, but he has nono of that prodigious muscular development common to •most prominent wrestlers, and on the score of visible muscle Jenkins looked the better man. As a matter of fact, however, Madrali, who had perhaps a stone the best of the weights, was far and away the stronger, and he was also the quicker of the two,, his catlike agility being marvellous in so big a man. Poor Jenkinu had a "very rough passage" all through, and early on discovered that the Turk was his master at all points of the game save questionable tactics. The first bout lasted nearly 20 minutes, but it was only spun out to that length by Jenkins' habit of making for the edge of the carpet directly his opponent got j him in a corner. Invariably Jenkins was on the defensive. Half a dozen j times Madrali had him*' set for a fall,', but again and again Jenkins, though j unable to free himself from the Turk's .bear-like clutch, managed to squirm •nd wriggle part of his body off the mat and so gain brief respite. Severe | half-Nelsons rib-crushing bodyholds were gradually, weakening the i

American, and once the only way he : could free himself from a. leg-hold was by kicking his rival in the face. This roused the usually placid Madrali. He went for Jenkins like a tiger and, getting his man down, gradually levered him over and pinned hka down. The second bout was more or less a repetition of the first. Time after time the Turk managed to get his opponent into what looked like an inextricable position, but every time a fall seemed imminent tbe American managed to get off the carpet. So they struggled for twenty minutes, Jenkins always being on the defensive, either kneeling or sitting on the mat. He had to put up with some rough usage, and was evidently in a bad way. Suddenly Madrali, with a vicious twist, levered Jenkins over on to? his side and almost pinned him down, but slipping a-s he applied the full of his sixteen stone, he enabled the American to turn over on his stomach. From that position Jenkins never freed himself. With his right arm on the hack of Jenkins' neck and the left tightly pulling the American's right arm, Madrali brought every ounce of his weight and all his mighty strength into play. A cry of distre.-.s came from the unhappy Yankee, and the referee intervened. It was high time he did, for Jenkins had collapsed completely under the severe mauling he had received,'and a couple of minutes elapsed before he came to his senses. The duration of the second bout was 22 minutes 40 seconds, and at the close Madrali was to all outward appearances as fresh as when he started.

CRUSTED CONSERVATISM.

To realise -what living in a groove means you must come to the Dear Old Motherland. A country in whose has-; . tory a few centuries are neither here I nor there produce, in the national eha[ractor a degree of eonsfflrrafem almost

unknown in the newer communities oversea. It.would be absurd to sug- • gest that the people of. the country do not move with the .times, but un- *■ dcubtedly the pace is more sedate than j colonials are accustomed •: to, and the stragglers on the road of progress are • far more numerous". You come' across ' many quaint examples in business and social life of men.and women jogging along in a rut which their fathers and grandfathers trod before them, and i which they never dream of trying to escape from.. .Let mc give one or two instances which have come under my notice during this week alone. Near a little country village, scarce thirty miles from London, I came last Sunday upon an old canal with the following notice painted above the lock: "Any person found -damaging- this lock will he liable to transportation." Considering that transportation was abolished by Act of Parliament in 1857, and finally ceased eleven years later (leisurely again!) the notice seemed rather startling. Then it dawned upon mc that the inscription had been repainted year after.year because it never pc- : eurred to the" rustic mind to alter it. The village painter, or whoever had the painting of the locs, could never have stopped to think that the lapse of years had made nonsense of this public warning. The villagers could never have seen its absurdity, or it would surely have been removed. No, it had been there as long aa they remembered, and their fathers had seen it there before them—therefore it must be "right. And this within thirty miles of London! Take another instance,, this =tim© the case of a presumably, well-educated .man. At an inquest at Windsor yesterday the coroner sharply trounced the witnesses who complained of the condition of the Bible they had to kiss. Buy a new book, forsooth! The idea was little short of scandalous in its audacious novelty. What was wrong with the old one? asked the coroner, with a fine scorn. It had been used by himself and his father before him for 70 years; thousands of.people had kissed it during that period, and he had neve.r heard of any of them contracting a disease in consequence. One shudders to think of the condition of* a Bible which has been "pawed" and kissed by generations of inquest-witness-es. I have seen Testaments which, after only a few months' use in Court, I should be sorry to have to kiss. Only the other day we read of a witness at the Old Bailey suffering from a contagious disease. But of course it is all nonsense to be put off by a little thing like that, and people who make a fuss about it should be locked up as public nuisances! One book was good enough for the Windsor coroner and his father for 70 years, so it must be all right. True, the coroner and his estimable father didn't have to kiss the book themselves, but that is a detail. The great point is that they must not be asked to go a step outside their 70-year groove. The very thought of such a thing send Mr. Coroner into a white heat. "THE LONG ABM" OF CUtCTJ»_STA~C_. The hunt for the missing man in the Merstham tragedy should have offered a splendid field for the clairvoyant arid*'«_l:' the second-sight brigade, but none of them have shown any disposition to throw the searchlight of their inner consciousness npon the mystery, save one crystal-gazing gentleman whose, belief, in his powers of second-sight is more enthusiastic than helpful. Placing his crystal on the murdered girl's gloves, the seer described the resulting pictures' ho a newspaper representative standing by. lie saw a.-train entering a tunnel; he saw a man and a woman straggling in one of the carriages—a man with a pale face; he saw the carriage-door open and a dark bundle disappear into the outer" blackness; he saw the man running along the hill above the tunnel, stopping at the mouth of it to peer into the darkness, and then riding away on a bicycle. Well, that may be very interesting, but it doesn't soem to carry us much further. Most of us could see as* much- as that for ourselves in the newspapers, without the aid of any second sight. But the crystal-gazer has placed his services at the disposal, of the bereaved family, "free of charge," so his sublime self-confidence is evidently still unshaken. On the subject of losings and findings, it is eurioua to notice how often a seemingly haphazard combination of circumstances can achieve the miraculous. The unexpected discovery of a missing object is sometimes just as wonderful as the most successful revelations of a magic crystal. Mr. Andrew Lang has collected come curious instances in an article in to-day's "Morning Post." A young lady, eating gooseberries in a garden, lost a ring. Everybody helped her to hunt for it, to no purpose. Next year she was again picking gooseberries, when the rin» slipped on to her finger out of the bush, where it had lain all the time on a, twig, unobserved. A puzzling ease is ] that of an old gentlemen's sapphire ring. Waking m a four-poster bed in a; country house ho. missed his ring, which he valued; it could not be found. Tears afterwards it was discovered in a fluting of one of the carved bedposts. How did it get there? In another case a man lost a ring when shooting on his moor.. Next year he was driven by rain into a cottage on the moor. lie broke a peat before flinging it on the fire, and there was the ring in the peat, into which, perhaps, it had been trodden by a casual cow. There is something of the miraculous, also, in the ease of an invalid lady who, while confined to bed, had her silver chatelaine handed.to her, and after using one of the objects attached to it, noticed that a silver needlecase was missing. A search was made, and all the bedclothes were changed, but the needle-cese could not be found. The lady recovered, went to another town, and paid a visit to the house of. a friend. Sitting in the drawing-room she j saw the needle : ease lying at her feet on the] carpet. The explanation suggested by Mr. Lang is that the needle-case was not really oh the chatelaine when she used it during her illness, aud that her view of it then, was hallucinatory, an act of false memory. The case had really fallen, before, into a fold of the dress whjch she later wore in Loudon, and thence it fell out again. Such is his theory; and it r? the absence ; of a.better. Fate! plays strange tricks in the little things of life as well as. in the great; and the long^arm- of dreumstanee is not the least of -nature's mir- «£_£__ ' ''■'/•;•: