Pan about Notabilities.

Auckland Star, Volume XLIII, Issue 113, 11 May 1912, Page 15

Pan about Notabilities.

I ' I Prince Joachim, the sixth son of the ' Kaiser, will be entered as a law student I at the University of Strasburg after Easter. He will study law with the son of Dr. yon Bethinann - Hollweg, the Im- . perial Chancellor. I There is a report that Count WolffMetternich will shortly leave the German Embassy, in London, and that he is to be replaced by Baron yon Stumm. Next Ito the doyen of the Ambassadors, M. 1 Cambon. Count Metternich has been longest at his post, as he was appointed in 1901. omphe. Here a dense mass of men rushied up at mc, and I was already thinking ; I should have to make use of arms when j : I heard the well-known guttural soun.ls I •of the sons of Albion: "'What's your ' name ?' 'What regiment ?' etc. They : were all of them newspaper corrcspou- ; dents.'' Mile. Collinere, a young Frenchwoman, is the most accomplished winetaster in j the world, though she is a teetotaler. : The great wine firms employ her for re- i gulur work and frequently for special | duty, and so wonderful is her gift that I she earns about 25.000 dollars a year. I She has often found so-called wines with | not a particle of grape juice, in them.! being made of cheap alcohol, sugar, dyes, 1 and still cheaper fruit juices. General Terrazas. whose ranch is 225 miles long, is said to be the greatest live-stock baron i n the world. It is esti- I mated that his ranches (lie has many of them) embrace an aggregate area of more than five million acres, and supply : nourishment for one million head of cat- i tie and as many horses and mules. Ten ' thousand men are required to operate them, and the services of one thousand . men are needed to "ride the fences." Miss M. C. Smith, superintendent of the women clerks at the post office savings bank in London, is responsible for keeping the accounts for one of the greatest banking institutions in the world. She has lived among figures for thirty-seven years and delights in her work. Under her are 1000 clerks, and she is held to account for the accurate keeping of 37.000 ledgers containing tha entries of about 10.000.000 depositors, whose savings amount to £180.000,000. i Sir William Nicholson, whose decorations all went down with the Oceana, is not the only famous soldier who has had to face the loss of his medals and orders. When Sir lan Hamilton was on his way back from the Japanese war he went to India and stopped at Mhow. One night a boy was stolen from his room containing not only his decorations, including the rare Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure, but all his diaries and secret papers. Many hours afterwards the box was discovered hidden beneath a road culvert some distance away. It was always believed that the theft was the work of a "secret service emissary, who meant to return for the box when the hue-and-cry was over. The King of Italy, whose recent escape from assassination rejoices the hearts of his subjects, attained vigorous manhood through an education of Spartan severity. His Governor wa3 Colonel Osio — sternest disciplinarian in the Italian Army, and the' Colonel's instructions to hi 3 private tutor were as follows:—"Treat the Prince as any other pupil; use no indulgence, even in thevery smallest things. If, for example, during the lesson, you need something, he, not you, must rise and get it, or it a book falls, he, not you, must pick it up." Nor was the Governor himsell slow in administering pointed and trenchant reprimands to his Royal charge. "Remember," he said to him one day, "that the son of a king, no less than the son of a shoemaker, when he is a donkey, is a donkey." By the death of the Duchess of BucTleuch many great houses were thrown into mourning in March. She was cne of that famous group of Hamilton sisters, daughters of the second Marque-is of Abercorn. by his marriage with Lady Louisa Russell, daughter of the sixth Duke of Bedford. Lord and Lady Abercorn and their family figure in Disraeli's "Lothrtir." and many years afterwards he was protected by Disraeli to a dukedom. The Duke and Duchess of Abercorn had seven sons and seven daughters. The Duke died in his seventy-fifth year, and the Duchess lived to be ninety-two. The seven daughters became Countess of Lichfield, Countess of Durham, Duchess of Buccleneh. Countess of Mount-Edgcumbe. Countess Winterton. Marchioness of Bland ford, and Marchioness of Lansdowne, of whom tbe last three survive. General yon Bernhardi. who has just published a sensational work"Germany -lid toe Nevt War'"—needless to say, with England—is the well-known ca-'-alry lender, the greatest, perhaps, in the Kaiser's army, whose treatise on ; "Cavalry in Future Wars." in which he hotly advocated the contimiar.ee of the "anne blanche." was warmly lauded by '--■ir John French in an introduction to! the English translation. Bernhardi, is' i captain in the 2nd Hessian Hussars— ' which also included an English Winsloe : —saw much of Bismarck during the armistice negotiations at Versailles, and lie had the honour of being the first officer to enter Paris with the 30.000 Germans on March 1. "We advanced." he wrote, "at full gallop through the long, empty avenue as far as tbe Arc-de-Tri-In "Two Years in the Forbidden City," Princess Dcr Ling gives an interesting sidelight into the character of that re- •- nrknbie lady, the lnte Empress-Dowa-r=r. from which it is quite clear that '.■•is great lady wns far from being the '.r.rcal. inhuman, icrnorrint Autocratic of imaginative journalists. She was a very I'f.mnn old lady, fond of her clnthes, af'"eetioT'.ate, extremely intelligent, and debarred only by her ancestry from promoting the highest good of her people. She apologised once to her ladies-in-wait-'H7 for compelling them to eat standing while she ate. "I am sorry you have to e.-t standing," she said, "but I cannot break the law of our great ancestors."' But still more pertinent is an anecdote of her interviews with her Ministers at the period of the Japanese successes in Manchuria: — "During one cf the conversations her Majesty remarked on the inefficiency cf the Navy, and referred to the fact that we had no trained naval officers. One of the generals replied that we had more men in China tb-tn in any other country. and as for ships, why. we had dozens of river boats and merchant boats which could be used in case of war. Her Majesty ordered him to retire, saying that it was perfectly true we had plenty of men in China, but the majority of them were, like himself, of very little use to the country."