FIVE QUEER PLACES.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 2210, 29 August 1910, Page 2

FIVE QUEER PLACES.

Doubtless the most unique spot in Europe is the little village of Alteuburg, where on its borders four countries meet. It is ruled by no monarch, has no soldiers, no police, and no taxes. Its inhabitants speak a curious jargon of French and German combined, and spend their days in farming the land, or working in the valuable calamine mine of which it boasts.

The little town of Stanley in the Falkland Islands possesses the most unique school services ever known. Two travelling schoolmasters are provided by the. Government, who visit the different families where there are children and give instruction. The length of their visit depends on the astuteness of the children and they may spend dajs or weeks, as the case may be, at one house alone. A town boasting of a railway station which cost £4,000 to erect and a duly-appointed station-master and yet having no train service, is unique beyond dispute. Dundee, in New Jersey, is in this predicament, the inhabitants having no trains, although a station is available for any amount of traffic. The reason given for this strange fact is that so long as the trains run through the ininhabitants ought to be satisfied. There is a place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, well known to mariners, where there is never any Christmas Day. This is owing to its being in the one hundred and eightieth degree of longitude and directly opposite to Greenwich, and therefore twelve hours ahead of Greenwich time. In a journey around the globe the other twelve hours would have to be marked out of the navigator's calendar, and if this point crossing the Antipodes is touched on Christmas Eve then there can be no Christmas Day.

In one of the West India islands there is a colony of some 800 whites and blacks where there are neither towns nor villages nor fresh-water supplies. In fact there is such a scarcity of everything that the Government has to send food and employment to the inhabitants to keep them from starving. Salt fish and sweet potatoes are the staple foods of the Anguillas and the only water obtainable is brackish and tainted by the sea.