WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 156, 20 March 1923, Page 6

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By

T. D. H.)

The Ruhr occupation has cost Franco £837,500. —But the French won’t know if it has paid until they find out what it has cost Germany. Franco has fceen presented with the birthplace of Napoleon.—What she really seems to desire is the birth of another Napoleon.

President Harding wants an international convention to prevent the bombing of unfort’fied cities.-—The inhabitants might feel safer with a few anti-aircraft guns when the time comes.

What makes the noise in an earthquake is a quest’on many people were asking one another yesterday. Professor Knotts, in his book on the physics of earthquake phenomena, says it is due to .the passing into the air by refraction of something under a thousandth part of the energy of the wave motion in the ground. The sound rises vertically into the air from the ground, but when the centre of the shock is at some distance the sound is ' usually heard before the shake, though the nature of the soil influences this. In Sunday evening’s shock the noise was not only louder than usual, but practically simultaneous with the shake, which, on this basis, would seem to point to the centre not being far away, but the earthquake books are full of so many qualifications that one has to leave it to the experts to thrash out a theory for each shake.

Sometimes the noise of an earthquake will be heard generally without any qnrthouake being felt, and it has been noted that more disturbance is felt on the surface of the earth than in the interior. In tho Assam earthquake of 1897, for instance,’the men in the. coal urines heard all the rumbling but felt nothing, while up on ths surface much damage was done.

Overheard yesterday.—First damsel: “The only persoiiTeft out in the cdfd by the earthquake seems to have been' the Government Seismologist.’’ Second damsel: What a rotten job the poor man must have, sitting down • and waiting for earthquakes to happen. It would give mo the creeps.”

Captain Amundsen, in his drift across the North Pole, is out on a polar expedition de luxe this time. He is fifty years old now, and has spent more time in polar exploration than probably any one else alive. Twenty years back he was exploring the ocean between Spitzbergen find Greenland, and in 1906 he was tho first man to make the North-West Passage, from which geographers, in the old days hoped so much, and which swallowed up so many lives before it was proved worthless Amundsen in the past has lived at a pinch like an Eskimo, but this time he has the Government of Norway behind him with liberal funds, two aeroplanes, and an up-to-date radio outfit to send Christiania weather reports twice daily from the roof of the world. His drift across the Pole, if it occurs, he expects to take from three to five

years, but he has food for seven years. Nansen failed to drift across the Pole, but De Long’s ship, the Jeannette, was wrecked in Behring Straits, and some of his wreckage was eventually washed up on the shores of Greenland.

Asked how he intended to pass the time when the Maude was frozen into the ice on her long drift, Captain Amundsen said: “Those who want to hunt will go out on snowshoes or with sledge dogs after walruses, seals, or nolar bears. The scientists with the party will have their'telescopes. fixed on the sky every available minute, watching the Aurora Borealis a.nd noting the electrical disturbances it causes. The navigators will keep a careful eye on the drift of the ice, and since I classify myself as a sailor and a cook, I’ll sail when there is an opportunity to sail —and I’ll probably cook the rest of the time.” The • Arctic seems to have attractions of some kind as a place of residence. Mr. Stefansson says even m the far north it is easy to live on the country, and affirms there is enough reindeer on the hoof in the Arctic Circle to feed a large part of tlif world

“F.K.” writes: Worshippers at StMark’s Church (and other Anglican Churches in We-llipgton that have retained tho old lectionary, etc.) vang the following seasonable words a few minutes after the earthquake had had its rumble :—“He hath made world eo sure that it cannot be moved”! (Psalm 93, verse 2, Prayer-book version.) This recalls that when Archdeacon Harper was vicar of St. Peter s he often took services at the Terrace Gaol and was struck with the frequency with which the prisoners chose the hymn “There is a Door Ajar for Me” 1

Lord Cholmondeley once obliged, King Edward at considerable sacrifice to himself.,'When that notorious company promoter E. T. Hooley was in his hey-day. he conceived the idea of living cheek by jowl with Royalty, and made a handsome offer to Lord .Cholmondeley for Houghton Hall, h's famous Norfolk home, once the residence of Sir Robert Walpole, and which adjoins Sandringham. This was before Lord Cholmondeley’s heir had married the wealthy Miss Sassoon, and the Hoolev offer was tempting. It is said, however, that King Edward declared that he would abandon Sandringham sooner than have the Hooley family and their associates hanging round Ins front gate and trying to get themselves invited to dinner. Lord Cholmondeley in consequence refused the offer. Hooley had an insane craze in this direction, for he once offered an enormous sum for Invercanld which “marches with” Balmoral, and a year or two before his latest crash actually got possession of Lord. Kitchener S beautiful Broome Hall, in Kent.-*

“S.S.” writes to say that the verses about the clever and the good which I printed on Thursday as anonymous were really written by Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, formerly principal of La<iy Margaret Hall, Oxford, and grandniece of the poet. The verses had a # familiar ring to me, but Neu lork “Outlook,” in which they appeared several years ago, was without knowledge of tho authorship. “S.S.” sends the’ original version, and writes : It was given to me in manuscript 28 years aeo by a friend of Miss Wordsworth s iiF England, and had then been quite recently written by her.” In the original there are some verbal differences ill the first two verses, and a third which conjures us to make each by each understood”: “For none can be good like the clever Or clever so well as the good. « New Zealanders who know their London will appreciate this from the London “Morning Post”: Facetious “lidy” to Cockney kerbside vendor of second-hand furniture, as she points at a dilapidated footstool: “Whore did you find that? In the Hark?” . r , L . ' The vendor: “Nah, I got it in the Tomb o’ Tooting Common.” OUTWITTED. Ho drew a ci tele that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had tho wit to win? Wc drew a circle that took 'him in. , —Edwin Markham.