GENERAL INFORMATION.

Golden Bay Argus, Volume VI, Issue 60, 22 July 1897, Page 3

GENERAL INFORMATION.

The correspondence of the Pope is still carried on in Latin. There has been no change in blacksmiths’ tools for 300 years. A Russian is not legally of age till he is twenty-six years old. A prominent doctor says tennis is the most healthful of all recreations. German shorthand writers rarely take down at a speed of more than forty-five words a minute. Japanese children are taught to write with both hands. A child should be able to speak perfectly at the age of three-and-a half years. In five minutes a woman can clean up a man’s room in such a way that it will take him five weeks to find out where she put things. How would it do for some of the men in the theatre to put on their tali hats, and sit in front of the women, just to see how they'd like it ? One of the oddest of all matrimonial cases on record occurred some time ago in the United States, where a lady sued her divorced husband for a breach of promise of remarriage. A Berlin shoemaker has invented an artificial stone sole for shoes, composed of a mixture of cement and white quartz sand. It is claimed that a pair of such soles will last for years, besides being elastic and comfortable to the feet. The custom prevails in Mexico of selling tickets for the theatre with coupons attached, each coupon representing an act. If, therefore, you want to see only one act, you purchase one coupon ; if two, a couple of coupons, and so on. A human skull, with red incandescent bulbs in the eye sockets, is the device with which a police lieutenant of a Chicago station scares culprits into making confessions. He darkens the room when he has a prisoner in the dock, and turns on the lights in the skull, producing gruesome effects and a confession in nearly all cases. Negro graves in South America are sometimes curiously garnished with the bottles of medicines used by the departed in their final illness, and the duration of the malady is easily guessed by the number of bottles. Often, these lire the only things to mark the mound, and everything about the graveyard bears evidence of the haste characteristic of a superstitious people in all matters concerning the dead. The world had a narrow escape of never having known a Sir Walter Scott. When a tiny babe he was left in chargo of a maid ; but the girl’s heart was in Edinburgh, whither she wanted to go to rejoin her lover. She was, however, compelled to stay and look after the infant at Sandy Knowe. The girl regarded her charge as an obstacle to be removed, and afterwards confessed that she carried young Scott up to the Craigs (under a strong temptation of the devil, as she expressed it) fully intending to cut his throat with her scissors and bury him under the moss.