NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9178, 6 October 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF.

Salisbury's Government 1 thinks of dising denominational schools. An Indiana judge has decided that a man who had been assailed wife. rotten eggs isi justified in shooting with intent to kill. Mr. Colter, of Beetly, Norfolk, has juub sold twenty-one Norfolk trotting stallions to a breeder in Illinois, and they have been despatched to America. The price for the lot was nearly £60,000. The order of Louis XVI. to the Swiss to cease firing on August 10, 1792, has been presented to the Carnavalet Museum (Mdme. de S6vign6's Paris house) by the descendants of Captain Durier, to whom the order was delivered. The Boston and Providence Railroad has already paid out more than one million dollars for damages resulting from an accident caused by a rotten bridge. It is safe to predict that the bridges on that road will be very sound hereafter. The Admiralty have given a contract to M'V'Srs. Maudsley, Sons, and Field, London, for engines of 20,000 horse-power for the new swift cruiser Blake, at an estimated cost of £140,000. The Blake is being constructed at Chatham Dockyard. Peterhof, which has been so prominent in connection with the Kaiser's visit, is famous throughout Russia for its extensive gardens. Tnese possess marvellous cascades and fountains. One cascade falls down a number of golden steps. Colonel Turner has received a letter from Lavender Hill, London, enclosing a cheque for £1000 to assist members of the Royal Irish Constabulary injured in doing their duty, and to reward those who have displayed conspicuous gallantry. In the whole sky an eye of average power will see 6000 stars. With a telescope this number is greatly increased, and the most powerful telescopes show more than 60,000. Of this number, not one oub of each hundred has ever been catalogued. At Haus, in Styria, an elephant from a menagerie broke down a wooden bridge and fell into a precipice three weeks ago. As it was impossible to raise him, food was let down to him, and he lingered in great pain till he died. Two of his legs were broken. There has just died at Birtley, a village in the county of Durham, a woman named Mary Long, at the age of 110 years. She leaves a sister aged 104, and a brother died a few months ago aged 100 years. The two deceased were blind, and so is the surviving sister. " The Emperor Frederick has left his memoranda to his wife as her private property, as is proved by his own writing. His diary is now again in the Empress Frederick's possession. Some volumes containing purely military notes have been given tc the State archives by Her Majesty, M. Renan has been saying he believes in devoting the early years of life to thought and study, and not to writing. "My opinion," he says, "is that France will perish in a literary sense because of her young writers. It is impossible to write well before the age of forty years." The total revenue derived by the British Government from working the telegraph lines of the United Kingdom during the fifteen years since it took possession of them has fallen short of the working expenses and the 3 per cent, on the amount paid for their purchase by £3,024,900. A celibate order among the clergy" is, in the opinion of " Rector," who writes to the Guardian, "one of the imperative necessities of the time." The avowed reason for this remarkable suggestion is the impossibility of supporting a wife and family upon the ordinary income of a curate." Women's rights are even creeping into China. The Marquis Tseng, well known as former Minister to London and Paris, has just celebrated the wedding of his daughter, Lady Blossom, when, for the first time in Chinese annals, the bride's consent to the choice of a husband was actually asked. The ladies of the aristocracy of St, Petersburg have organised a series of sleigh races in which they are to be the drivers. Each will have her own colour, and the competitors must be not less than twenty years of age nor more than forty. Entries are limited to the aristocracy, and the prizes are very magnificent. Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, formerly the residence of Horace Walpole, was offered at auction in London a few days ago, but though a large company was present, the only bid obtained was one of £15,000. The auctioneer withdrew the property, saying that more than £100,000 had been expended upon one wing of the mansion alone.

Count Herbert Bismarck, the favourite son of the Iron Prince, was forced, much to his disgust, to share a sleeping compartment with a commercial traveller while journeying to Dublin by the Irish mail train. The train was crowded, and the "drummer" declined to be bought off, while the company's official intimated to the Count that " he could take it or leave it," Miss Letitia A. Walkington, Master of Arts of the Royal University, Ireland, has the distinction not only of being the first lady graduate in arts, but also the first to take a degree in laws, having passed most creditably, after private study, the examination for LL.B. just held in Dublin. About a dozen Irish ladies have passed the recent examinations for the degree of B.A. A blind man, who had murdered his wife in a fit of jealousy has been tried and acquitted at the assizes in the Department of the Bouches du Rhone. The accused had been told by the gossips of tbe neighbourhood that his wife had been seen in the company of a strange man, and he accordingly cut her throat while she was asleep. He then gave himself up to the gendarmes. A large number of leading Hindoos and Mohammedans of Upper India and Bombay have formed a body called the Indian Patriotic Association. The prospectus states that the object of the association is to counteract the agitation of the organisations in India ana of the national congress, and to oppose the attempts to introduce doctrines subversive of the conservative in-' stincts of the Indian races. Eight million baskets of peaches are expected from Delaware and Maryland this season. It will be the largest peach crop ever gathered. Last season the same territory Furnished only 1,500,000 baskets, and the whole crop, including that of New Jersey and the Hudson Valley, amounted to only 4,500,000 baskets. They are packed in neat crates holding twelve dozen peaches, and each peach is kept separate by pasteboard partitions. Two men named How and Murphy were sentenced to eighteen months and five years respectively, at Liverpool assizes, for burglary, on the evidence of an accomplice named Mossop, barman, who was courting the daughter at the house broken into. The judges described him as a shameless liar and a scoundrel. He stated in his evidence that he earned £1 a day by a patent betting system, which he started on £10, his share of the burglary. The French census reported 180 persons who were one hundred years old or over, but M. Levasseur, who has been investigating the matter, reports to the Academy of Sciences that sixty seven of these were only " believed" to be so by their relatives, and that there were only sixteen whose age could be proven to be over one hundred years by authentic documents. He esti mates that there are not over fifty con tenarians in the country. A gallant attempt at rescue ended fatally at Plymouth on August 12. A railway porter named Stoneman was bathing in the river Laira, when he missed his tooting, and got out of his depth. His cries reached a young man named Forrest, who at once jumped in, and almost immediately sank through the failure of the heart's action. Stoneman was eventually rescued by a boat. The would-be rescuer was washed up dead an hour later.

The London Lyceum holds only 1850 of an audience; the Olympic, 900 ; the Opera Comique, 1000 ; the St. James', 1000 ; the Strand, 1000 Toole's, 900; Vaudeville, 1000; the Gaiety, 1150; the Haymarket, 1100 ; the Comedy, 1185; Drury Lane, the Alhambra, and the Britannia, each 3500; the Empire and Covent Garden, 3000; Her Majesty's, 2444; the Prince of Wales, 1200; the Princess', 1900; the Royalty and Terry's, 800 ; and the Criterion only 750. King Milan was once a gay young spark. On one occasion he lost £24,000 in an evening at the Nobles' Casino in Vienna,, and, being unable to pay, liar) to solicit the help of the Emperor or Austria, who gave him the money and a lecture, The next night he lost £10,000. This time the Emperor would neither lend nor give, and Prince Milan had to raise £8000 on a richly jewel* led scimitar which was presented to Princ< Milosch by the Czar Nicholas of Russia The sword is still unredeemed.