NEWS AND NOTES.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVI, Issue 122, 21 November 1908, Page 12

NEWS AND NOTES.

A KIDNAPPED CHILD. The following sequel to a strange story is from The Times of 9th October : — The little Nottingham gi)>] Frances Seiger, aged seven, who was kidnapped upon leaving school in the afternoon of 26th June, ran up to the door of her parents' home in Whilford-road, Nottingham, last night shortly after 8 o'clock crying, "Mama, Mama, I have come home." News of her return spread rapidly, and within half an hour a great crowd of many thousands gathered round the house cheering. No event has created so much excitement locally for a long time. The child, who oold her story with extraordinary intelligence, said she had been wbll and kindly cared for, and an examination proved that she had suffered no injury. She said a man had asked her to go an errand, and, consenting, she was taken on a tram-car and subsequently walked a long way and entered a house. There she was kept until last night. She slept in an upper bedroom, the man sleeping'in a room below. No one else was in the house, and when the man went to work he locked her in the bedroom, giving her toys to play with, and he brought her down into the kitchen when he returned at night. She was never allowed outside and saw n > one. The man, she says, was whitehaired and had a long white beard, but she persisted in saying he was young. His work was "clean. Last night he brought her out for the first time and again took her on a car, walked a long way, and finally, within a few hundred yards of her home, told her to run home, giving her a letter. The letter, written by an illiterate person, in pencil, says :—: — " I think it best to return your child, and in consideration I hope you will take no further proceedings. lam sorry to have caused you so much trouble, but it was through circumstances over which I had no control." During the hot weather school children Jn Oldham (Lancashire) are being taught in the public parks. The total income of the English Bar is estimated at £780,000 a year, or an average income per member of £315. Fish worth £57,000,000 is landed every year in England and Wales, .finding employment for 40,000 men and boys. Westminster City Council spends about £250 per annum in payment for doctors' certificates, which' it insists upon all its employees -forwarding wfipn they fall ill. The council says it is money, well spent, for the system prevents malingering. Chir.a contributed £20,000 last year tr wards the expenses of Chinese students in foreign countries. A Pennsylvania bridge, 150 ft long and weighing 300 tons, has been placed m position in three minutes, and without interrupting traffic. Before a thunderstorm the Australian humming-bird covers the top of its nest with cob-web, which is a non-conduct>,r of electricity. Mr. F. W. Gibbins, of Neath, High Sheriff of Glamorgan, has been granted permission to appear on official occasions without a sword, as he is a member of the Society of Friends. The Lord Chamberlain stated that precedents existed for the omission of the weapon on account of conscientious principles. Lake Morat, in Switzerland, turns red every ten years, owing to the presence of a tiny plant, which is visible only j through a microscope. Americans in England have subscribed £134 towards the cost of restoring the church tower at Purleigh, Essex, where Lawrence Washington, great-grandfather of George 'Washington, was formerly re dor. M. Paul Woifskei, Professor of Mathematics at Darmstadt, has instituted ai prize of £5000 as an inducement to re-discover the famous Theorem of Fermat, which has been lost for two centuries. It was Fermat who first applied algebra to geometry, and it was of him that Libri, declared that he knew many things of which we are ignorant ; in fact, in many things he >\vas in advance of his successors. The new Pulman train do luxe, now in construction for the London-to-Brighton line, will cost £40,000.. It will consist I of four drawing-room cars, two composite smoking cars, and a buffet fitted in a style hitherto uaapproached in railway enterprise. It is said to be the finest train in the world. Mr. Churchill (saye the Westminster Gazette )has taken a very usefu 1 step in "consolidating," expanding, and popularising the working of ths Act," passed in 1896. "He sets up a standing Court of Arbitration. ' The Board of Trade' will have three panels of (a) Impartial chairmen, (b) employers, and (c) employed. The court in the case of any particular dispute will be composed of members diawii from all three panels, the number of employers and employed being either one or two — the court will have three or five members There may be also technical assessors, but they would have no vote. We think this ought to prove a very useful working arrangement ; it will save much time if a Court of Arbitration is always on the rank (so to speak) ready to be called up at any moment. No new legislation is necessary, and the respective panels are to be formed at once. We hope and believe that this new prmanent machinery will prove of very real service in maintaining industrial peace. The Saturday Review holds that the idea that the co-operation of the public can do anything to diminish the heaviernoises of London will have to be relinquished as a dream. It says : As to the sporadic noises of street-organs, coal-hawkers, costermongers, and newsboys, they are really survivals from the quiet period before the present overwhelmingly noisy era began. They will die out when they are uo longer wanted. A street where a dozen coal-hawkers succeed one another and raucously cry out could be supplied by one conveyance if the coal-dealers amalgamated, as the railway companies are doing, or if there were a municipal coal depot. When the organ-grinder collects no more pennies in the slums than he does in the middle-class streets, his machine will disappear. We will Dot attempt to forecast the future of the costermonger and the newsboy. Perhaps a little stricter police administration may ho effectual for them. But at the best let us not delude ourselves with the possibility of a quiet London. It has been discovered that a happy miller's family living in the vicinity of the battlefield of Waterloo have derived a regular income since 1815 from the sale of a rusty iron nail. It was not many years after the battle that an eccentric Englishman, on the strength of an eye-witness's evidence, discovered that Napoleon's hat* 1 hud been hanging on that nail, the emperor having rested a while at the mill during the battle. An offer for the old nail was immediately accepted by the previously guileless miller, who after thf dca! replaced it by another old nail and painted an inscription round it on the wall pointing out its historical value. One nail after anothet has gone to enrich collections as m-iceless Nanoleonio r alien.