TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13377, 19 March 1909, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Ono of the drawbacks of MeTba's being a great singer, or Mail-Bag, indeed a celebrity of any kind, is the number of appeals one receives for help. Beggars of all kinds, eomo shamefaced, some utterly shameless, some .with genuinely pitiful tales, constantly bombard the celebrity with letters, and to an artistic temperament the experience is distressing. Madame Melba no sooner set foot on Australian ground a few weeks back than tho ordeal began. At every address, letters reached her, says the "Argus," letters plausible, pitiful, or impertinent, letters asking for tickets, forwarding doggerel verses for setting to music, or appealing for money as gift or loan. Here is an artful appeal. "I. cau-not refrain from telling you of a dream I had recently. I. dreamt I. died and went to Heaven. And as I. entered' I board a. single Voice. It was most Glorious. I listened. Then I. said that is Melba, is it not? Altho I. never heard you sing, an I. am afraid I. never shall, as I. am too hard up. but the dream was rather uncommon, was it not." Tho writer may have received tickets for a concert, but we are inclined to think sho did not. The former proprietor of a small school that was squeezed out by a relentless Department, declares that tho Yorkshire gril/ within him is urging him to fight for existence, but this unconquerable spirit does not prevent him asking Mad'axne Melba to set him up as a miblic raconteur under her patronage A woman who has "married beneath her," and says she is so poor that ehe and her children are almoet naked, -ippe.ils for money under threat of suicide. Moro pitiful and with a truer ring is the letter of a mother ■who has lost her son, "the only stay I bad, ai d loved by everyone" and is in the hands of a money-lender, to whom sho ov\es £15. Her husband suffers from fits and dyspepsia, her daughter has undergone four operations, ana , slie supports a grandchild whose parents are coad. She earns from 3s 6d to 4s a 'lay. Letters like this are enquired into. Madame Melba's secretary states that since May last she has paid out ever £8000 on her employer's behalf in response to appeals, but tho n.ore Madamo gives the more she is persecuted. ,

Mr Victor Grayson, the

A well-known Socialist M.P., Practical was recently the victim of Joko. a practical joke, which will

be voted amusing or silly, stupid, according to the individual point of view. Hearing that Mr Grayson had determined to electrify tho Labour Conference at Portsmouth with a. stirring speech, Mr F. T. Jane, well-known naval critic, and Captain Kenneth Wilson, a retired Army officer, resolved to get him out of the way until it was too late for him to make turn his energy into volte. Mr Jane had a racng car, so it -was decided to invite Mr Grayson to go for a sight-seeing trip on it during the luncheon adjournment, and to run about the country until the afternoon was well advanced. First of all the young Socialist's nerve was tested by a speed of sixty miles an hour along a country read (poor other traffic!). Then a halt was made at a hotel for lunch, and Mr Jane tipped the waiter to be as long as ho could in bringing in the courses. On the run back to Portsmouth tho car was stopped for an imaginary breakdown, and Mr Jane fussed about among the

works, while Mr Grayson expressed himself freely about the delay. Eventually Mr Grayson left the car without thanking his hosts for the pleasant outing, and took a tram-car into Portsmouth. One result of the joke, we fear, was io give Mr Grayson a splendid advertisement, for certain London papers gave the account of the escapade greater prominence than then woukl have given to any speech of his. The joke had an interesting sequel. Captain Wilson received a telephone message purporting to come from a friend, asking him to go to Southampton to see a football match. He went, but there was no friend and no football match. There was, instead, a with a number of Mr Grayson's sympathisers, about which tho captain was very reticent, but in which, it is understood, he tjave as good as ho got. He is over six feet high, and a formidable man with his fists, so the encounter may have been complicated with casualties.

»Some interesting facts Wasted Heat, have recently transpired in England in regard to the intrinsic value of heat at present allowed to go to waste. A conservative 'estimate- places the value of heat-energy wasted in the United Kingdom at £50,000.000 per annum— a cum sufficient to provide a respectable number of Dreadnoughts. Striking confirmation of tho contention is supplied by tho fact that a generating station which produces 3000 h.p. of electrical energy derived entirely from waste heat has been started to work at Crook, County Durham. It appears that, apart from the waste in factories, the blast furnace and coke ovens of Britain alone produce waste heat equivalent to about half a million Jiorso-power. On the north-east coast alone, according to a recent paper read before the Iron and Steel Institute, they emit waste heat equal to 200,000-h.p. night and day. In this particular locality, however, a solution of tho difficulty presented by the large and continuous loss of heatenergy appears to have been reached, for there the district is covered by a network of mains belonging to the great eJectric power companies. These mains supply electric power to the railways, shipyards, collieries, etc., throughout the district, thus enabling tho nominal owner of waste heat to turn it to profitable account, as apparently all that ho requires to do is to transform it into electric power at the point of wastage and whisk it away twenty or thirty milce to where there is a demand for its assistance. The waste gases are used instead of fuel to raise steam in water-tube boilers, the steam driving a turbine, which in turn drives a dynamo, and the electric power thus produced is turned into tho mains of tho big power companies. All parts of Britain, however, have not been seized of the same practical notion of turning an otherwiso waste product to profitable account. An expert engineer computes tho amount of coal burned in Britain at tho prodigious total of 107,000,000 tons per annum, and of this amount he estimates that at least the virtue of half is lost in the process of burning. Not only is England wasting her carboniferous substance with a prodigal ha-nd, but she u> contributing to tho wealth of fogs that annually envelopes the "tight litt-lo island."