NEWS IN BRIEF.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8531, 3 April 1891, Page 6

NEWS IN BRIEF.

' The dispute among the local bootmakers is still unsettled. • Lord Onslow will attend the races at ' Hamilton on Saturday. There were two persons in the lock-up last evening on charges of drunkenness. Stormy meeting at the Kuaotunu Quartz Crushing Company yesterday afternoon. A Melbourne tobacconist named Tobias was fined £30 and £5 5s costs for using his shop as a place for betting in. A number of silvered pennies and gilded shillings have been in circulation as florins and sovereigns at Adelaide lately. Over 300 French soldiers arrived in Sydney recently by the French mail steamer Yarra from New Caledonia, en route to Marseilles. W. H. Redriff, postmaster, Kiandra(New South Wales), has been arrested for defalcations. The amount has nob yet been ascertained. Louis Muller, who accompanied McDougall Stuart on his first and second trips into the interior, died recently at East Adelaide from cancer. Mr. James Churchill Fisher, the wellknown musician, died at his residence, Parramatta, on March 22, the 65th anniversary of his birthday. Fernandez, the aeronaut, tried to ascend in a balloon at Bathursb lately, but the balloon burst the first time, and the second time was not sufficiently inflated. An epidemic of croup has been raging at Windsor (N.S.W.), and many children have succumbed to the disease. One family in Windsor lost two children in one day. Tho Adelaide railway revenue for the week ending March 14 was £27,709, that for the corresponding week of IS9O being £19,886, showing an increase of £7823. Duncan McKenzie, the keeper of a hamshop in Melbourne, supplied an excise officer with whisky with a ham sandwich, and was fined £25, having no license to sell liquor. Mr. A. W. Blaxland, a late official in the Australasian Shearers' Union and the founder of the General Labourers' Union, has seceded entirely from the labour party. The ironfounders of Victoria have received from the ironfounders of England, Ireland, and Wales by a recent mail a proposal to federate the whole of the ironfounders all over the world. The R.M.s. Ballarab sailed from Hobart last week, taking about 25,000 cases of fruit for London. This is the largest ship- j ment ever yet sent from this port by a single steamer for England. At Coraki (N.S.W.) a girl of ten years became entangled in the belting attached to the machinery at the Woodburn butter factory. Her hair was drawn in and she was scalped, besides having one leg broken. It is highly probable that a convention of representatives of the various unions of Australia, New Zealand, and Tasmania, will be held to bring about amalgamation, with a view to uniting with the old world. An Adelaide newsboy was the victim of a nasty accident recently, anothey boy flicking a hairpin into his right eye by means of a piece of elastic. Ryan was removed to the Hospital, and will probably lose tho sight of the eye. The returns of the Adelaide wheat crop from central, lower north, upper north, south-eastern and western divisions of the province give the grand total of 10,513,890 bushels, from an area of 1,753,832 acres, or an average of six bushels per acre. The memorial stones of the new building in connection with the Industrial Home for Blind Women, Albert Road, Strathfield, were laid on March 24, by the Countess of Jersey, the president of the institution (the Mayoress of Sydney) and Mrs. H. S. Prescott. Mr. Hind Smith stated a few days ago at the Sydney Y.M.C.A., that he bad travelled to the leading centres of population in New Zealand, where he considers the work of the Y.M.C.A. had very much declined. It has, however, been resuscitated in Wellington and Christchurch.