Pot Pourri.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 424, 27 March 1880, Page 4

Pot Pourri.

CABUL. Some folks there are who give it full, And boldly call the place Cabul; While others make it rhyme with wobble, And ask us, " What's the news from Cabul ?" And learned maidens gently babble About the dreadful news from Cabul. Some speak it that you're scarcely able To know it from the Atlantic Cabul. Let those who rightly call the " bauble " Ope wide the mouth and talk of Cabul.

A rather tough yarn comes from Bendigo. It is to the effect that a horse belonging to a wood-carter got out of its paddock one fine morning and visited in turn each house at which its owner was in the habit of leaving wood. It was observed to stop opposite each place for a few minutes and then move on. Having paid a visit to each of its master's customers, the animal returned home, lay dowD, and died.

Mr. Gladstone, in a little after-dinner speech at Lord Rosebery's table the other day, playfully alluded to the many presents he had received in Scotland from deputations and representatives of various industries. He said that he had not only been housed and fed, but clothed, having received from various quarters a complete suit of clothes with the exception of hat and boots. " That," said Lord Rosebery, quickly, " is an omission that must be remedied." And so it was. When Mr. Gladstone left Dalmeny he carried in his portmanteau a splendid Glengary cap and a pair of strong boots, completing his Scotch outfit. It is becoming more and more the practice of English landowners to make enormous provision for their families by insurance, and it must take a large figure out of their incomes. It is, for instance, said that the life of the Earl of Pife was insured for £280,000. Of course the earlier insurances made by him must have paid pretty well, and the companies which had them were lucky, but some of his latter investments—for realisation after death—will cost the companies a pretty penny. Of course the sum has been divided over pretty nearly the whole insurance world. The Canada "Medical Journal" has the following :—" It is well known that in America everything is counterfeited ; the wooden hams and nutmegs sent from the New England States are well remembered. Eggs are now also counterfeited, and this manufacture is carried out on a large scale. On one side of a large room the reporter saw several large copper vessels filled with a thick glutinous mass, which a man kept constantly stirring. This was the yellow of the egg—the yolk. On the opposite side were similar vessels, in which the white was fabricated. The eggshells were made of a white substance resembling plaster of Paris, by means of a blowpipe, just as soap bubbles are blown. After being dried in an oven, the egg-shells are filled; first with artificial albumen, then with some of the artificial yolk, and lastly with a little of the artificial albumen. The small opening at the end of the egg was closed with white cement ; and the greatest achievement of modern civilisation, the artificial egg, was ready. In appearance it resembled a natural egg ; but, whether cooked or raw, it was indigestible and injurious to health." A rather good story, anent the preaching of Advent sermons, comes (says the Continental correspondent of a contemporary) from the country which is preparing to welcome its new Queen with a new series of A priest of Estremadura had chosen the sin of gluttony as the object of his special castigation, and dilated on the horrible nature and consequences of this vice with such eloquence as to produce a deep effect on the minds of his congregation, including his own housekeeper, all of whom were deeply impressed, for the

time being, with the duty of restricting their appetites to the very simplest fare. On returning to the parsonage the good woman proceeded to put in practice the theories so eloquently expounded by the curate, and accordingly threw away the succulent luncheon she had prepared for his reverence, replacing it by a few vegetables, with a reasonable allowance of bread and water. The priest, on coming home, summoned his housekeeper, and complained indignantly of the meagreness of the repast awaiting him. The housekeeper repeated various passages of his sermons, when the priest cut short her quotations with the query :—" You have been to the square now and then on a Sunday evening to see the dancing?" "Yes," replied the gouvernante, astonished at the question. " Did you ever see the band join in the dancing ?" continued the priest. "No, certainly not," replied the housekeeper, " the band's business is to make other people dance." "Well, remember in future that I am the band."

The American is singularly good-natured. He keeps his temper under very trying circumstances. He suffers without complaint, delays and inconveniences that would put an Englishman first into a towering passion, and subsequently, as he grew calmer, into the notion of writing down his grievances to the Editor of The Times. The American stands unruffled amidst many petty annoyances, or he sets to work as vigorously as he can to remove them. If an evil cannot be avoided, he grins and bears it without troubling his* neighbors with his sentiments thereon. It must be something exceptionally startling that will take him by surprise. He is by no means of a serious temperament. The ppirit of unrest is strong within him, but his strivings are mainly after the attainable, and as they are often successful, the influences upon his nature are in the direction of calmness and cheerfulness. It is a difficult matter to throw him into a passion, but he has the faculty of saying biting things which are very apt to a great blaze of wrath in the man he bandies words with, unless that man be of the same peculiar character as himself, in which case what both say is not half so severe in spirit as it apparently sounds. The cause of the success of the American in business is no secret. It is brought about by meeting every possible demand ; and then by watchfulness, or ingenuity, or importunity, creating a demand where none before existed. If the public will not come to him to buy, he will go to the public, and he will strive as best as he may to furnish what the public are likely to be tempted to purchase. At a banquet held in a maritime town of South Australia, says a writer in the Australasian, a newly appointed magistrate, who, from his name, should be one of the wisest of men, had entrusted to him the toast of " The Pastoral and Agricultural Interests." In proposing the toast, he spoke after this fashion—" I am glad this toast has been placed in my hands, for I know something of the mattter. I have been a member of a Wesleyan Church for some years, and greatly rejoice that we have a pastor here—in fact, two pastors—showing that the pastoral interest is increasing. (Cries of 'Order,' and 'Come to the point.') I'm coming to the point. I'll show you that I'm coming to the point. Here is a subscription list for a Wesleyan chapel. Now, you who really care for the pastoral interest, just put your names down here !" lam sorry to say that the spirit in which the proposal was received promoted the conclusion of that speech.

Mr. Edwin Arnold writes in rapture with Buddhism and Buddha. He sums up Buddha's ''Five Rules" elegantly as follows :

Kill not, for pity's sake, and lest ye slay The meanest thing upon its upward way. Give freely and receive, but take from none By greed, or force, or fraud, what is its own. Bear not false witness, slander not, nor lie ; Truth is the speech of inward purity. Shun drugs and drink which work the wit

abuse; _ Clear minds, clean bodies, need no soma Touch not thy neighbor's wife; neither commit Sins of the flesh, unlawful, or unfit. These laws would seem to us at least half as good as the Hebrew Decalogue. The wicked would say twice as good.— Argonaut. THE Rev. Dr. Sherwood, of Brooklyn, has not a very high opinion of religious editors. " Some of them," he says, "had not the decency to wait until the trial of Talmage was ended, but irrespective of evidence and all rules of judicial fairness, acquitted the accused and condemned the prosecutors." The doctor thinks the glory has departed from the religious Press and rests upon the secular, and hence he has little or no faith in the conductors of the Church newspapers who underrate the conscience, and intelligence, and good sense, and judieial fairness, and regard for the good name of religion on the part of the great body of believers, when they make such a demand on a question so vital and so sweeping in its relations. The doctor would despair of the church of the future, he says, if he believed its policy, and duty, and character were to be mainly shaped and controlled by the organs of religious thought. He shows that they have bean behind instead of being foremost on such moral questions as temperance, slavery, and other reforms of the age. " There is nothing new under the sun " is an adage which has its exceptions. The newest thing in sleeve-studs has just been imported by an enterprising Auckland jeweller. The Herald thus refers to these novelties :—" They are in the form of squares of platinum, covered with white enamel, on which is stamped, in a microscopic form, the title-page of Punch, or a page of the London Daily Telegraph, and the news can be comfortably read off with a good glass. A man may 4 wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at,' but he would scarcely be suspected of wearing the day's doings upon his sleeves, yet the trick may be done. The set of sleeve studs we inspected yesterday contained a page of the Daily Telegraph, with all the English and Continental new 3."

A statue of Eve is talked of in San Francisco, according to the News Letter, which gives the following report of a women's meeting on the subject :—"They praised up Eve and ran down Adam awfully. Adam was mean. He told tales on Eve about that apple. Eve oidn't tell on Adam ; she was true as steel. When the dreadful day came, and the deputy-sheriff ejected them from their homestead, Eve ddn't stand there blubbering, but set to work at once and made Adam an ulster of fig leaveeand herself a new petticoat. She deserves, and must have a statue."

A Correspondent of the Cinciniati "Gazette," writing from Eton, Ohio, says:— " Recently Nelson Davis, of West Alexandra, this county, cut down an oak tree about lix feet in circumference, in the centre of whfah was a cavity about seven inches square, parily filled with some rotten kind of wood and rollaf cloth, which crumbled when touched. Insile of all was a German Catholic Prayer-boor, bound in leather and much worn. The bode was printed in 1726, and had a Latin introdu:tion, while some of the blank leaves are filld with writings in French, part of which is unintelligible, but enough is easily read to shor that the owner was a French soldier, tells wha; battalion, and mentions the naoae of one of tte officers as De La Magne. It may be of h> terest to members of the Historical Society. 1 growth of at least five inches over the hoi where it had been slipped hermetically seale( and preserved the book. It is now in th hands of W. C. Barnhart at his book store ir this place, and is regarded by all as a greai curiosity." Mrs. Dunway, of the Ncio Northwest, at : literary reunion at Salem, Oregon, " toasted' the gentlemen as follows : —" God bless 'em they halve our joys ; they double our sorrows they treble our expenses ; thby quadruple om cares ; they excite our magnanimity ; the} increase our self-respect ; they awake enthusiasm ; they arouse our affections ; they control our property ; and out-manoeuvre us in everything. This would be a very dreary world without 'em. In fact, I may say, without prospect of successful contradiction, that without 'em it would not be much of a world anyhow, We love 'em, and the dear beings can't help it ; we control 'em, and the precious fellows don't know it. As husbands they are always convenient, tho' not always on hand ; as beaux they are by no means ' matchless.' They are most agreeable visitors ; they are handy at State fairs, and indispensable at oyster saloons. They are splendid as escorts for some other fellow's wife or sister, and as friends they are better than women. As our fathers, they are inexpressibly grand. He may be a failure in business, a wreck in constitution, not enough to boast of as a beauty, nothing to speak of as a wit, loss than nothing as a legislator for woman's rights, and even not very brilliant as a member of the Press ; but if he is our own father we overlook his shortcomings, and cover his peccadilloes with the mantle of charity. Then, as our husbands, how we love to parade them as paragons. In the sublime language of the inspired poet :

We'll lie for them We'll cry for them, And if we could we'd fly for them, We'd anything but die for them."

The toughest spiritualist yarn we (Thame 9 Star) have heard for some time was related to us lately of a well-known believer in Spiritualism residing in this district. He is a hardheaded Scotchman, and from his statement it appears he has been turning his knowledge of the mysterious to good account. His wife has been ailing for some time past, and a sceptical neighbor asked the husband " What medical man was attending her ? Was it Payne, Kilgour, or Huxtable ?" " No," replied the spiritualist, "we hae got our family docther, Dr. (naming an eminent physician who died at least a century ago), an' my word," continued the spiritualist, " she's comin' roon fine." This story is related by a person of unquestionable veracity, and we believe it to be true.

One of the amnestied deportes recently landed at Auckland, from New Caledonia, writes to the Star :—" We pledge our honor that we shall endeavor to become useful colonists ; our aim will be to follow the good example set by our political brethren who preceded us in this free country ; we promise to respect your laws, for we like laws giving equal rights to all citizens, but we hate those which resemble cobwebs, catching the small flies and allowing the big ones to escape scot free ; we sincerely thank yon for the distinction you have drawn between political offenders and common law convicts."

Vendors of goods in the new " Paddy's Market" at Christchurch are not to be permitted to interfere with the shopkeepers' trade except in certain branches. Under instructions from the Reserves Committee, "notices have been served on holders of the newlyerected stalls in the Market place, informing them that the following items only must be offered for sale in the market :—Fish, meat, poultry, bacon, vegetables, fruit, flowers, dairy produce, and colonial produce generally. The object of the opening of the market is to give the producers an opportunity of trading direct without the intervention of middle men.