News and Notes in Brief.

Evening Post, Volume LIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1897, Page 2

News and Notes in Brief.

* A useful clarity called the London Spectacle Mission provides spectacles for needlewomen and other deserving persons dependent on the eyesight for a living. Last-year 726 applicants were provided with spectacles. There is one good explanation of the faot that great oities almost invariably grow towards the west. As regards Europe, the prevailing winds are from the west and south-west, so that these portions of the towns are brighter, cleaner, and healthier than the eastern. Armenia, which is now playing so important a part in the politics of the world, is an indefinite extent of country— its boundaries being variously estimated to oontain anything from 50,000 to 150,000 square miles. Part of it is in Asiatio Turkey and part in Russia and Persia. The Dutch have a delightfully original way of collecting their taxes. If, after due notice haß been given, the money is not sent, the authorities place one or two hungry militiamen in the house, to be lodged and maintained at the expense of the defaulter until the amount of the tax is paid. Mr. Arthur Hamilton, a wealthy and eccentric Englishman, has just died near Vienna, leaving behind him a most remarkable series of collections, not the least singular of which consists of twenty thousand buttons, representing all the uniforms of the different armies of tho world. Another collection is made up of the teeth of all the most formidable wild beasts, while, in contrast to this, are three hundred and fifty-two fans which originally belonged to the most beautiful women in the world. A mile of hedge and ditch equals an acre of land. The amount of extra land that would be available for crops, were all the hedges in the United Kingdom trimmed properly, would be equivalent to 60,000 aores. A gentleman in England is having a twostory house constructed on wheels, to bo propelled by a motor engine. He says that in the future it will be as easy to move a house as an omnibus. The house will be four-roomed, with a framework of steel tubes, and with a collupsible upper story to render it capable of passing under bridges. There is but one monarch in Europe who can show the scar of a wound received in war. It is King Humbert. He, at the Battle of Custozza, which resulted so disastrously for the Italians, endeavoured in vain to stem the tide of defeat, throwing him*elf repeatedly into the very thick of it, and giving evidence of a courage that con only be described as heroic. Bleeding from a severe sabre cut, he was at length literally swept off the field of battle by his father's officers and by his own friends, who fully realised the irreparable injury that would be sustained *by Italy in the event of the popular heir to tho throne (as he was then) v heing either killed or captured. Rhodesia, according to the Matabele Times, has had a narrow escape. The story runsthat after the Matabelelaud Mounted Police left for Pitaani, there were not ten mounted police left in the whole of Matabeleland. It was only owing to a hitch somewhere that the whole of the Rhodesia Horse did not march to the border as well. " Thank God," proceeds our contemporary, "for that hitoh! Forbad they gone, and taken all the remaining field guns and Maxims, as intended, the Matabele would have done with the whole of Rhodesia what they are stated to have done with the township of Mazoe— viz., 'scoffed' it. Every white man, woman, and child would have been wiped out completely, and Buluwayo would have been raaed to the ground." There is a very remarkable plant which grows in the colony of Natal. Its popular name is the Corpse plant. It grows to a very considerable size, and its principal feature is a bell-shaped throat something like the flower of an Arum lily, but much larger and deeper, and opening into a hollow stem. It is almost black in colour, and covered with a thick, glutinous secretion. Its principal characteristic is its loathsome odour, strongly resembling that of decaying oarrion. By means of this it attracts oarrion-feeding birds to it. Once they alight on it they are lost. Their claws become entangled in the secretion, th(^ bell-shaped mouth folds up, and they are literally swallowed, feathers and all, and dig«sted by the juices secreted in the throat of the plant. Her* is ono way in which things are "made in Germany." The Frankfurter Zeitung refer* to the strike which recently occurred in Berlin on the part of women who work for the ready-made clothes shops, and says that investigations have proved that the earnings of women amount par week to 2s 3d up to 16s 8d in trousermaking, 4s 2d up to 21s 6d in waistcoatmaking, 12s up to 29s in coat- making. The lowest wages are generally paid. The higher scale is paid in very few cases. No wonder tven the East-tnd sweater finds it difficult to compete with employers whos« hands will work for half- &- crown a week.