NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVIII, Issue 6148, 1 August 1881, Page 6

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Miss Louisa GouRLAr is playing in "Bonnie Fishwife " at the Park Theatre, London. Mr. Harry Rickards sings "In Memoriam," a dirge on the death of Beaconsfield. Miss Lizzie Morgan has joined the Hart " Happy Hours " Company, on the West Coast.

Mr. Walter Reynolds intends to leave for Sydney this week to procure theatrical novelties for New Zealand.

The Manawatu Standard says that a wholesale depopulation has set in at Ashurst in that county. A man named Torke recently went mad at Navasota, Texas, through being elected Grand Master of Odd Fellows.

It may not be generally known that goods can now be booked through, by railway, from New Plymouth to Normanby. It is reported that an effort will be made during the session to have the next meeting ol the Rifle Association at Christchurch, or Auckland.

The 382,920 CoDgregationalists in the United States gave last year for their religious work £738,538, or an average oi nearly £2 per member. During a recent visit to the Otaria school the Southland Inspector found only one scholar to examine. The bad stale of the weather was the excuse.

Mr. J. Tautari, Taumarere, Bay of Islands, has presented to the Christchurch Museum a specimen of Hausmannite, black manganese, from Waiomio (Kawakau).

Up to the present time (says a Dunedin paper) about 4300 copies of the revised edition of the New Testament have been disposed of by eight firms in Dunedin. In 1880, the New Zealand imports of soft goods, including boots, shoes, and haberdashery, amounted to £1,365,000, or £800,000 less than the previous year.

A bridge, 130 feet long, is to be built over the river Styx. Charon will not, however, be thrown out of employment by this; it is not his Styx but a Canterbury river of that name.

Judge Walker, ef Illinois, was recently robbed of £60 by two men who politely assisted him into a railway carriage. He did not discover his loss till a few hours afterwards.

Speaking of the sparrow nuisance at a meeting of the Oamaru Agricultural Society recently, a Mr. Little said he had lost £150 worth of grain during the season by sparrows. In suburban and country land there is at the present time in Sydney an enormous amount of speculation, and rapid fortunes are being made by the prompt and knowing ones. After thirty years' absence Robert Thorn, of Haverhill, Mass., came home recently, and his first business was to kick over a tombstone that had been erected to his memory many years before. A Boston paper states that a Chicago grocer sells soap, every tenth cake of which contains in its centre a gold dollar, and that the citizens of Chicago are in consequence getting to look tolerably clean. Absentee owners of \Vairoa (Hawkes Bay) property, are now, many of them, anxious to sell. They are tired of holding '' on spec." The yearly county rates have been well rubbed into them, and produced the desired effect. •.

Through the reduction in the price of strychnine, poisoned wheat is now sold in Canterbury at 5s 6d per 151b3., for the purpose of destroying sparrows. One gentleman states that he has destroyed nearly 600 sparrows a day by this method. . The Customs returns for the last quarter show that no duty has been collected on opium. A contemporary opines that the heathen Chinese " must have been smuggling: to account for this—previous quarters having averaged from £40 to £50. • The theory that a submerged body can be raisad by firing cannon over it was recently proved in Chicago. A - plumber named Leonard had • jumped off the wharf and drowned himself, and his friends got out the artillery and raised him by firing over the spot where he had gone down;:

■A" Queensland gentleman, writing to a ssientific friend in . Sydney, says that at the mouth of the Noosa Kiver, a little south of Maryborough, eight human skeletons have been found in a cave, with a quantity of mathematical and astronomical instruments and documents.