One Thing and Another.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 866, 5 October 1888, Page 7

One Thing and Another.

The gentleman is solid mahogany ; the fashionable man is only veneer. Captain Francis P. Fleming, who will probably be Florida’s next Governor, is said to be of distinguished ancestry. He is related to Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, to Mme„ de Stael, and her mother, the famous Mme. Neckar ; and moreover, he is a deacendaht of the Washington family and the Virginia Laniers. Miss Minnie Freeman, the scboolmarm heroine of the blizzard in Nebraska, is in Southern California and has decided to make this State her home for the future. She has received 2,700d01s from the subscription raised for her benefit, beside two costly gold watches, three diamond pins and as many pieces of jewelry. There is a young man in the Spanish department of the New York Life Insurance Company who will be the hero of the day in ’92 when America celebrates the 400th anniversary of her discovery. His name is Cristobal Colon, and he is said to be the only surviving descendant in a straight line of Christopher Columbus. The new Criminal Code of Italy, just promulgated, abolishes the death penalty for murder or any serious crime. It substitutes therefor imprisonment for life. The first ten years is to be in solitary confinement at hard labour. ' Samarkand, a city of Central Asia, belonging to Russia, is said to have been selected as the place where the Czar is to bo crowned Emperor of Central Asia. As a city it had a history far back in the mists of antiquity. Alexander the Great occupied it. i In England a man may call himself almost anything he pleases and nobody will object. For something like 30 shillings he may advertise in the Times the taking of a new name, and thereafter he will be John Jones or William Smith, just as he prefers. The new clock just placed in the tower of the Glasgow University is a tremendous af fair. The main wheels of the striking and quarter trains are twenty inches in diameter. The weight of the hammer that strikes the hour is 120 pounds, and it is lifted ten inches. The valet custom in England extends even to the poor lodging-houses or working-men’s homes. In all these common houses there are men who, for a copper or so a week, black the boots, cook the supper and run errands for the aristocratic among the lodgers. The editor of the Cologne Gazette has been sentenced to three months imprisonment in a fortress for publishing an incorrect statement that a landlord had refused to sell to the German Government land on •wbioh it was proposed to ereot a statue of Emperor William I.