Home Clippings.

Bruce Herald, Volume VII, Issue 649, 13 November 1874, Page 7

Home Clippings.

PUREING,

" Purring," as practised at Wigan, is decidedly more painful than pleasant We usually associate "purring" with peacefulness and quite. It suggests a cosy ingle nook and a torn cat comfortably curled up in the corner singing in tone to the kettle on the hob. Puss, we know, though

" Ne'er so tame, 'so cherished and locked up, Will hare a wild trick of bis ancestors."

The Tiger occasionally asserts itself, and a cat'B capacity for ingeniously tormenting any unfortunate mouse that comes within his clutches is of the highest order. When " purring," however, there is nothing about puss suggestive of cruelty. The sharp, hooked claws are carefully concealed in their velvety Bbield. " Pur» ring" at Wigan is quite the opposite of this. It is the tiger in action, not in repose. At the Liverpool Assizes the other day, a Wigan collier named GHover, twenty-three years of age, was charged with feloniously wounding an old man. aged eighty-four years, who was too ill to appear. It came out in evidence that the prisoner assaulted the old man in his own house without the least provocation, and left him speechless. He then went out and told his mother to "go and see old Daddy. I have killed him. I have giving him a good purring, and purred the old to death." The "purring," it transpired, consisted in kicking the old man about the face and head with a pair of wooden clogs until he was well nigh dead. For exhibiting hie capacity for cruelty in this ingenious manner, the presiding Judge sentenced Glover to ten years' penal servitude. The sentence is none too severe. Indeed one almost regrets that, as a deterrent to others, the Judge did not have the power to sentence this specimen of the felidse to be " purred " in the most approved Wigan fashion, THE AEISTOCBATIC LIEUTENANT AND MB WARD HUNT. There is a good story flying about West End circles that may be worthy of repetition. It is said that the First Lord of the Admiralty has noticed from his official position the constant attendance of Lord Charles Beresford, one of the members for Waterford, not only to his Parliamentary duties, but also to those which belong to his social relations in the metropolis. The right hon. gentleman being unable to reconcile this with the post occupied by his lordship as flag lieutenant to the Commander-in-Chief at Devonport, took an opportunity of speaking to Lord Charles upon the subject. Rumor adds that in the course of their interview, Mr Hunt, after pointing out the incompatibility of the two positions held by Lord Charles, deemed it requisite to suggest that one or the other shall be resigned. The reply was rather a poser. " Oh, certainly," his lordship is reported to have said, '" I'll give up the county, and I know that there are two Home Kulers who are anxiously awaiting the vacancy." The pressure about to have been applied by the First Lord of the Admiralty was of course withdrawn, and the two posts of Hag lieutenant and M.P. are still held by the witty young nobleman. — ' Dunfermline Express.' itUItAL IMMORALITY. Is there not something wrong in the teaching of Scottish clergymen ; or, something more perceptive in the eyes of the Eegistrar- General of Scotland than in those of the Kecorder for England ? The pleading from the pulpit on the north side of the Tweed does not seem to be effectual in checking unchastity in the rural disrricts ; or in towns which are the centres of agricultural population. Out of 3721 births, there were in July 340 illegitimate children in the eight principal towns of Scotland, for which the returns are compiled. Three of the seaports are wonderfully free from this vice, Leith shewing only 3.7 per cent., Greenock, 4.7, Perth, 52 ; but Glasgow rose to 87, Dundee to 10.3, and Aberdeen 16 per cent. It is strange that Aberdeen should be nearly at all times conspicuous. The west country of Scotland has lately don« a little extra divergence from the moral laws, and there, what might be called •• patriarchial system " prevails, that is, that the men are fed under the roof of their masters' kitchen, and sleep above the horses. When the bothy pystem is. common, there is not so much immp,ral>*y. It has been suggested t^b.?vt young men should lodge w}th married ploughmen. It is a good idea — if married ploughmen bad sufficient accommodation for them,.. They have not, and much of the dissatisfaction of the Vuorer ili England bag fu-itstm fVom the f>act that they were houped Uncomfortably at long distances from their work. What tho Scottish clergyman, should do. is fco leave out a little eeclesiasticism, as the Archbishop of Canterbury told the English clergy the other day, and dwell more upon every* day things, the same as St. Paul did. It waa Palmerston, if v. 7 O forget not, who told the Edinburgh people who petitioned him for a day of humiliation on account of the cholera, that the beat thing they could do was to whitewash the ol^ea, and look after sanitary avrSiD^etaents internally. If tho u4in*ster.3 in the rural districts of Scotland would urge upon landlords the necessity of having better houses upon the lands they own, this dark stain upon the Scottish escutcheon would he plotted out. — * Farmer.' DEAN STANLEY ON" SECTARIAN NARROW MINJIEIiNESb. £4e&n Stanley, referring probably to the correspondence between the Bishop of Lincoln and Mr Kent, preached in Westminster Abbey, from the text, "Two men went up to the temple to pray — the one was a Pharisee and the other a Publican." He referred to the narrow-minded and sectarian spirit in which men individually and collectively were in the hsbit of *

thanking God that they were not as other men. Some of the great spirit ual movements of Christendon bad often been begun by the great lay world abolishing evils which the Pharisees of the ecclesiastical world often would not touch with their little finger. There was no such sharp distinction between the material and spiritual and the sacred and the profane as some would have us believe. Tbere had been timea when the great secular society had despised the hard, working, pure-minded, Bimple hearted Christiana, or Catholics, or Puritans, with a spiritual pride as lofty and as empty a« ever was down on the unregenerate and the reprobate of the world. Yet the early Christian martyrs, media val missionaries, the monk of Wittenberg, were mightier in the long run than Tacitus op the philosophers of the Rennaissance; and those wayward Christians in England, as they seemed to be — John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost"; Johu'Bunyan, the author of the " Pilgrim's Progress"; Bishop Kent, the author of the " Morning and Evening Hymn "; John Wesley, the author of the " Keligious Eevival in England " — went down to their graves as much deserving of the praise of true statesmen even as Clarendon and Bolingbroke, as Walpole and Hume. In short, the result of the parable was to teach each man to seek to know his own secret failings, and to look justly, calmly, and charitably on those of others, remembering that in the judgement of our Maker often the last should be first and the first last. "He that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." NOETH GERMAN AGRICULTUKAL LABORERS. Those who are under the delusion that; the North German agricultural population is better off than our own, and that the emigration which perceptibly de creases its numbers is the mere feverish ness of adventure, moved by reports from a new world, would do well to study a recent controversy between the ' National Zeitung ' and the ' IS'orddeutsche Zeitung* of Berlin on the subject. The former newspaper, speaking in the interests of the peasants of Prussia proper, declared that those of JSileaia are Jar better off r inasmuch as the loss of population in the latter province during the Thirty Years' War made such a drain oi labor that the landlords had to tempt their workmen to settle by giving them permanent dwellings and ground of their own to cultivate. Un the other hand, in Prussia proper the cottages belong to the landlord. A cow cannot be kept without his sanction, and the agricultural laborer may be said to own nothing in the world but what he carries on his back. Such is his constant state, according to the 'National/ as long as he is able to labor for his bread, and when too old for this he is handed over to the poor relief of the district. In short, the picture drawn by the writer might have been taken direct from Dorsetshire or Wiltshire. The 'Norddeutsche ' replies in the landlord interest, and traverses these assertions in detail. Very few of the Siiesian peasants, it says, have any patrimony nowadays, whatever was the case two hundred years ago. The only advantage over the Prussian agriculturist is that they are free to make engagements for work, >vhile he is usually bouud down for a term of six months at a time, receiving part of his payment in land or pasture. Nor is it true that the steady working peasant come 3in his old age upon the poor Jaw. This lot is reserved for those who have been known as vagabonds, and in whom no landlord has a personal interest. Moreover, there are regular chances of promotion in hig own line of life to such posts as bailiff and the like open to the field- hand who seeks to improve himself. On the whole, however, concludes the • Norddeutsche * writer, after making as fair a case for the squirearchy of his country as is possible, "we do agree with the ' National' that the lot of the agricultural laborer in the province of Prussia is not a brilliant one, though he is not worse off than the town workman. Those who would really improve it should give their first attention to giving him a better dwelling. It is not to be denied that the cottages even on the Crown domains leave much to be desired."—' Pall-Mall Gazette.'