PERSONAL ITEMS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 9711, 5 January 1895, Page 4 (Supplement)

PERSONAL ITEMS.

When Mrs. Vanderbilb wants to eat the wing of a partridge she has ten birds cooked and served to choose from. ■ The table in the Vanderbilt household costs £1000 a month. Rudyard Kipling wears a scarlet fez and eye-glasses in his sanctum ; he smokes a pipe, and his room contains a rifle, a whisky decanter, a syphon of soda-water, and other like accompaniments ot British manhood. Heine's statue, after being refused by the city of Dusseldorf, where he was born, has now been refused by Mayence, where at one time ho lived. By a majority of 23 votes to 13, the Town Council of the latter town has refused to grant a site for the erection of the monument. The dramatic profession, more than any other, is addicted to hobbies. Henry Irving has a passion for old armour; Edward Terry is a successful gardener; Weedon Grossmith amuses himself with the brush ; his brother George is an amateur enginedriver ; Madame Modjeska's embroidery is famous among her intimates; Mary Anderson models well in clay; and Sarah Bernhardt paints and fences. A man of many hobbies is Mr. Charles Godfrey Leland—"Hans Broibmnnn." His latest is a perfect passion for the mending and repairing of every imaginable . thing, from broken china to worn-out clothes. Mr. Leland's long grey beard and the soft felt hat which he usually wears give him a venerable, almost a patriarchal appearance ; but his spirits and his marvellous energy are as fresh as ever. The English climate does not suit Mr. Leland, and his time is mostly spent in Italy.

President Cleveland, though always courteous to newspaper reporters, is much averse to having photographs of his family appear in print. During the late Presidential campaign every effort was made by reporters to obtain a portrait of his infant daughter, but all of no avail. Kodaks were pointed at the child in every direction, and money was offered to the nurse-girl to induce her to allow the baby to be photo graphed, but in vain, and up to the time the child was two years old no photograph of her had appeared in the papers. With a modest humour peculiarly his own, Mr. Pinero, the dramatist, is fond of ascribing the success he has achieved to a downright stroke of good fortune. Whilst playing a round of stock business, some years ago, at the Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, he was cast for a very small part in "The Woman in White." Wilkie Collins, who was present the first night, was so struck with the performance of one of the actors that, on his return to town, he asked Mr. Cavendish to engage the gentleman. In reading the playbill to Mr. Cavendish's secretary, he somehow mixed up the names, and Pinero was engaged. " But for this fluke," says Mr. Pinero, "I might even now be playing low-comedy at two guineas a week in the provinces." Mr. Hall Caine, whoso recent statements regarding the inferiority of woman attractod some attention, has called down upon his unlucky head a spirited rejoinder from John Strange Winter (Mrs. Stannard). In the commencement of her literary career, Mrs. Stannard says in the Young Woman, her father died, leaving the family without a penny. She lived far from London and had no friends to help her in the literary world. " Yet before I was thirty, my name was known all over the English-speaking world. I have married, brought children into the world, ruled my house, sold a million and a half books, kept up an enormous circle of friends, helped several charities and many strujrglers both in kind and in influence, have kept my house better than most women, and have a husband and children who worship me and are never really happy unless in my actual presence." "On the other hand," Mrs. Stannard proceed?, "you have Mr. Hall Caine, who is a small, fragile man, who cannot work in London, who, by his own showing, is thoroughly exhausted by the effort of writing a single book, a bundle of nerves and fancies. Ho began his literary career with an enormous advantage over me. He has a wife to mind his house, and to bolster him up when his nerves get too much for him. I fail to see where his immense superiority over me comes in."