GLEANINGS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 860, 24 August 1888, Page 5

GLEANINGS.

WHERE WOMEN ARE WITHOUT HOPE.

There are iu Asia 200,000,000 of Buddhist women, not one of whom, according to her religious belief, has any hope of immortality, except perchance after transmigration through many animals, their spirits may enter some boy infant. This is the highest hope a Buddhist woman has. It is in part by reason of holding out to them the possibility of reaching heaven as woll as men that Christianity wherever taught finds ready acceptance among the Buddhist women. A SIAMESE EMETIC. Dr. Sfcurge, a medical missionary to Siam, relates how a native doctor administered an emetic to a love-sick lady who had swallowed a quantify of opium with suicidal intent. The scientist of Siam took a live eel, clipped off a part of his tail to make him squirm in a lirely mannei, and then pushed him, tail first, down. the romantic damsel’s throat. When tho eel returned to the stream of running water, near which the girl was made to recline, the opium quickly followed him. THE PRISONER’S FRIEND. Mrs Ernestine Schaffner, of New York, spends the greater part of hflr time and money in behalf of prisoners whom she believes to be wrongfully accused. She visits the police courts, and where she sees a man or woman who seems to her the victim of circumstantial evidence, she furnishes bail, and at her own expense secures the services of a lawyer. So far Mrs Schaffner’s judgment has proved correct. She has always won the oases of her profcdgds, and has never lost a dollar by going bail for them. The Lapps are a very religious people.

They go immense. distances to hear their pastors. Every missionary is sure of a large audience, and an attentive one. All the babies are left outside, buried in the snow. As soon as the family arrives at the little wooden church and the reindeer is secured, the father excavates a little bed in the snow, and the mother wraps baby snugly in skins and deposits it therein. Then the father piles the snow around it, and the parent go decorously into church.

A patent has been granted in England for the manufacture of vinegar from tomatoes. The fruit, when ripe, or nearly so, is reduced to a pulp and steeped in water for twenty-four hours. . The resulting liquor is drawn off, sugar added, and the whole allowed to fermeut.

Miss Watson—‘Didn’t Mr Jones say to you as I entered the drawing-room last night, ‘Clara, is that the beautiful Miss Watson?’ Clara, ‘ Yes, dear, with the acoent on “ that ” ’

A carat of gold received its name from the carat-seed, or the seed of the Abyssinian coral-flower. This was at one period made useful when gems of gold were to be weighed, and so cane about the peculiar and. now general use of the word.

According to a recent traveller’s account, there is a wonderful brown and golden bird in Mexico, a specimen of the bee marten, that is a remarkably expeit bee catcher. He has a way of ruffling up the feathers on the top of bis head, so that his orest looks exactly like a beautiful clover. When a bee comes along to sip honey from the delusive blossom, it is snapped up and devoured.

The story is told iu the Alta California that some Eastern tourists called to a man who was digging in Joaquin Miller’s garden, near Fruit Vale, and asked to be shown over the place. The man dropped his pick and showed them the crematory, the waterworks, the wolf den, and all they desired to see. But they expressed great disappointment at not having found the poet at home. ‘Now, look here, old fellow,’ said one of them to the man, who was about to resume his pick, • what sort of a looking man is Joaquin Miller, anyhow?’ ‘ Well, he looks like me,’ was the quiet answer. Like you ? Looks like you?’ ‘Yes; I am Joaquin Miller.’