PERSONAL ITEMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 9307, 16 September 1893, Page 4 (Supplement)

PERSONAL ITEMS.

Joseph Hessel, the Austrian, who is said to have invented the marine screw pro- | peller, died in abject poverty. A monument was erected to his memory the other ] day in Vienna. ! The new Commander-in-Chief in India (Sir George White) has accepted the presidency of the Temperance Society in India not because he is himself a teetotaller, but because he believes that crime in the British Army is almost entirely due to the influence of drink. The Czarewitch, while in London, is said to have received a letter from Nihilists, accompanied by a fragment of a rusty chain, which the writer said was symbolic of the cruelty practised in Russsia, and which, if persisted in, would bring abaub a terrible vengeance. English society papers say that Sir Francis Jeune, the judge who sentenced the Duchess of Sutherland for contempt, was years ago that lady's lover, and came very near marrying her when she was only a dean's daughter. This would account for the emotion he displayed when committing the Duchess. The first Mrs. Rider Haggard was a Miss Carroll, of Baltimore. She was divorced from the English novelist, and is now living on the Pacific coast) with a third husband. Mrs. Haggard, nee Carroll, is the original of the writer's remarkable creation —the terrible and ageless beauty. " Shewho-must-be-obeyed." Ten ladies have passed the examination for the Cambridge mathematical tripos. Two are wranglers, and one stands between five and six on the list. This, is a great achievement, and recalls the year 1890, when Miss Fawcetb beat the senior wrangler himself. As women are not admitted to the university these ladies simply take rank in the tripos, without having any real place on the list. The late Sir Lothian Nicholson, Governor of Gibraltar, was a very gallant fellow and ready to risk his life not only in the heat of action, bub in cold blood whenever he thought that duty called him. When he was employed in the destruction of the docks at Sebastopol he descended a uhafb in which a sapper had been overcome by foul air and brought the man to the surface quite as a matter of course. The late Sir Richard Owen, the eminent scientist, once paid a visit to Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The hosb walked aboub the grounds with his guest, the latter wearing a smart pair of lavender gloves. Full of his favourite subject, Owen suddenly stooped and picked up an unsightly creature (it was either a toad or an uncleanly frog), and the nauseous creature he laid on the palm of his lavender glove! Mr. Gladstone's impressions of his guest?were that seldom, if ever, had any man of science lefb on his mind such an impression of genius—"nob talent merely, bub genius." A few weeks ago there died in Adrianople one of the most famous and original of the subjects of the Sultan of Turkey. He was Hadshi Achmed Izzeb, Pacha GovernorGeneral of the velayeb, or province, bordering on the Black Sea. Hadshi Izzeb was an ideal Turk of the old school, a strange mixture of Solomon-like wisdom and childish foolishness, energy and apathy, cruelty and mercy, truth and deceit, generosity and avarice. , In the eyes of $is ruler and contemporaries he was a hero, and ib was with a purpose clear to many that His Majesty appointed him Governor-General of Adria. nople and kept him for so many years ab the head of that important province—the gateway to the Ottoman empire. The Pacha was bora more than ninety years ago, and rapidly climbed to places commensurate with his name and the influence of his family. At the time of his death he was thp dean of the Turkish Viziero. Almost countless are the anecdotes told of the Pacha, who was known and respected from the Turkish Dan to the Turkish Beersheba. His hatred of the "Christian dogs," as he always called the people of the West, was boundless. Ib was invariably his custom, when force by circumstances obliged him to give his hand to a " dog," to wash it upon withdrawal, while in the presence of his guest. But that was not all. If in the course of his communication with the " white-faced foreigners" any part of his clothing happened to touch them the gar* meat) was never worn a second time.