WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 2209, 22 August 1910, Page 7

WORLD-WIDE NOTES.

+ AN INDIAN CRIME. The Occidental reader who shrugs his shoulders deploringly over the evils of Indian caste has little conception of.what suffering the custom involves. Its tragedies extend even to the humble, commonplace matters of every-day life. A little incident needs no comment. Stones and flying sticks were thrown at a little parish girl whose shadow, as she passed, defiled the food of a Brahmin.

He merely threw away the rice, which the dogs soon finished. But the bystanders, who witnessed the girl's insolence in going s« near a holy man—she, so base and unworthy—flew at the unhappy creature who ran away screaming, and dropping the load of wood she was carrying on* her back.—"Enchanted India,"

"THE FIRST OF HER SEX. M

JAPANESE! SELF-CONTROL.. The self-control of the Japs, under stress, as well as their characteristic courtesy, which begets quietness and descretion, are both very remarkable. "Cry. It will do you good," the writer once said to a poor Japanese woman, who, crouching beside her dying husband, was controlling herself by an effort that would, I feared make her ill. She laid her little slim brown fingers upon her trembling red lip and shook her head, then whispered, "It might disturb him." "'Cry. It will do you good," I said, the next day, when the man was dead, and she seemed almost prostrate with grief and over-enforc-ed self-control.

"It would be most rude to make a hideous noise before the saored dead/ came the soft reply.—"St. Paul's Magazine."

A ROYAL "PRAM." Princess Juliana of Holland has joined the ranks of the caravanners. A marvellous construction —should it be called a "carambulator" or a "carapram" ?—has been devised for the little Dutch princess wherein,, when the weather is cold and the sun shines only in certain parts of the Het Loo, she can be conveyed from the palace to the sunshine. It is, as a matter of fact, a giant covered perambulator containing a stove and seats for nurses, besides the bassinette for the Royal baby ; and it is, of course, drawn by a horse. If she were an English princess, she would at once be nominated patroness of the Caravan Club. — "Lady's Pictorial."

YARMOUTH ROWS. Great Yarmouth contains what is said to be the narrowest street in the world, known as Kitty Witches Row, and its greatest width is fiftysix inches. Its entrance would seriously inconvenience a stout person trying to pass through it. Twentynine inches from wall to wall is all the room that can be spared in this part. Yarmouth is a quaint old town containing many streets like Kitty Witches Row. They are all called rows, and are more picturesque than convenient. A hundred and fortyseven of these narrow streets of a length of over seven miles in all are to be found in the town. AT CLOSE QUARTERS WITH A TIGER. The story is told of a young British officer at a tiger-bunting expedition, who won his life honestly by sheer presence of mind from a tiger after he had been pulled from an elephant and almost killed. At the approach of the line of elephants which bore the hunters the tiger started from his lair, and did not wait for the attack, but sprang to the back of the nearest elephant. A dozen shots were fired at the tiger while in mid-air, and several struck home, but he landed, nevertheless, blood-flecked and savage. Seizing the officer about the waist, he dropped to earth, and started for the jungle. The other hunters were afraid of killing their comrade, and so did not dare to shoot. With sorrow m their hearts, they began to follow the bloody trail. What was their astonishment, half an hour later, to come upon the tiger lying dead and the officer sitting by the carcase, dazed, but conscious, holding his empty revolver ! Although terrorstricken, he had had presence of mind enough while being carried along by the tiger to pull out his revolver and plant two shots in the brain of his striped captor.

Down to 1845 the third-class passenger had no legal status at all on the railways. Many companies would not carry him at any price, others put him in an open goods truck with movable seats placed across it, and charged him ljd- P« r mil* for the luxury, too.