LONDON GOSSIP.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1248, 30 January 1896, Page 13

LONDON GOSSIP.

From Our Special Correspondent. LORD SALISBURY AND THE TURK. London, December 18. The Marquis of Salisbury does not, I firmly believe, care a row of pins about the butchered Armenians, and if it were possible to allow the, " unspeakable Turk " to go on exterminating them, he would far rather do so than embroil Great Britain in what must admittedly involve most serious complications. But it really isn't feasible to hold aloof much longer. With such widely differing journals as The Times, the Westminster, the St. James' and the Spectator urging prompt action, and a mass meeting of both parties called to " strengthen the Premier's hand," even a Government like the present dare not longer shilly-shally. What howls of execration would have been raised by the Tories had Mr Gladstone been the Minister who, after bragging at the Mansion House of his fixed resolve to stand no nonsense from the Sultan, allowed that amiable potentate to go on killing and mutilating ad lib. Would it have been the least use then, think you, to ask for time and to urge the exceptional difficulties of the Premier's dilemma ? Ten thousand times, No! Not a solitary Conservative could have kept his hair on for five days, much less five weeks. Time —whilst the flag of England was being dragged in the mud! Time —whilst a filthy Turk spat contemptuously in Britannia's face ! Time —whilst our innocent allies were being massacred wholesale ! Time whilst the heathen exterminated Christians! Time! Great Jehosaphat! Only a Gladstone dare have demanded anything so shameful and unreasonable. Thus would the press have bellowed had Liberals been in power. THE CUBAN INSURRECTION. From Lieutenant Winston Churchill, a son of the late Lord Randolph Churchill, whose relaxation from military duties at Home has taken the form of a journey to watch the operations (more or le.-s warlike) of the Spanish troops agair.-t the insurgent Cubans, comes an expression of opinion confirming a suspicion which must have harboured in the minds of Ml who have followed the course of event;- in the western island. The young officer his had but a short experience in such affairs, but he is on the spot and has been in what we may term for want of a better phrase, "the thick of the fighting." He has therefore been able to form a very fair idea of the merits and chances of the opposing forces. His conclusion is that the war will never end and that Spain will not be able to suppress or harm the Cubans to any extent. This pronouncement is supported by the occurrences of the past few months. The rebels have always fought on the principle of " he who fights and runs away, &c," and so long as they adhere to this policy Spain will never be able to clinch matters no matter how big a force is sent. Theie is no Cuban army to demolish by one decisive battle, nor any particular position to capture. The island is dotted about with guerilla bands, the individuals in each of which may be peaceful husbandmen one day and bloodthirsty rebels the next. A strong Spanish force moves about unharmed, but a mule train with a weak escort finds every copse or brake alive with Cubans intent on " potting" Spaniards. So the Spanish generals can strike no decisive blow, but all the while they are throwing away the blood and treasure of a country which, however rich in food for powder, is in sore financial straits. A continuance of the disturbance will also ruin Cuba, and it seems that Spain would be wise to try to compromise with the hardy islanders for its own sake.

RE-APPEARANCE OF MRS LANG-

WORTHY

Do you remember the Langworthy case ? It was one of the biggest sensations which

marked Mr " Boomster " Stead's regime on the old Pall Mall Gazette. Moreover, it had this striking peculiarity: the agitation proved entirely successful. There had, truth to tell, been features which somewhat detracted from the brilliance of the good man's previous journalistic achievements. The law courts took a painfully distorted view of his efforts in connection with the Maiden Tribute scandal, and no sooner had he conclusively tried and acquitted the murderer Lipski in the Pall Mall Gazette than that indecorous ruffian spoilt all by confessing his crime. Then there was the Dilke affair. Mr Stead hounded down the unhappy Sir Charles remorselessly for months. Unlike those who knew him he believed him guilty. So he called on the public to curse him. But somehow the public wouldn'i and didn't. On the contrary it gave the distinguished statesman the benefit of the doubt, and to-day he can hold his head almost as high as Mr Stead himself.

The Langworthy case was a great triumph. Don't you remember how Mr Stead unearthed the beautiful, the trusting, the much wronged victim of the wealthy Langworthy's lust ? Can't you recall the thrilling story of the elopement, of the wonderful adventures of " our heroine " by sea and land, of the attempt to repudiate the legality of her marriage with Langworthy, of baby Langworthy's birth, and of its portrait in the Pall Mall Gazette of the period. Mrs Langworthy's sorrows were tremendous. When, however, she emerged from the courts plus .£24,500, there were not a few ladies who would have liked to take them all on at the price. Mrs Langworthy disappeared into private life amidst noisy good wishes. She had .£7OO to .£BOO a year to exist on—a pittance, perhaps, but still, one would have thought, enough for a lonely woman and a child, events took place ep: or seven years

years asro. Mrs Langworthy is now in the Bankruptcy Court! I fear Mr Stead may be disappointed. "Another old 'boom' gone wrong," one hears him mutter. "Eliza Armstrong, Lipski, Mattei, Rate Marsden, Chicago, Mrs Langworthy ingrates all! Only Julia, nry saintly spirit guide remains, and realty, what with her straight tips which turn out crooked and her bogus political prophecies, I sometimes fear there's more ' spoof' than ' spook' about her."

GUILTY, TILL PROVED INNOCENT. " You take care what you're about or I'll have you locked up," is a not uncommon phra.se in the mouths of creditors who are both angry and ignorant of the law. But locking a person up happens, from the legal point of view, to be an exceedingly serious matter, and, when a mistake occurs, becomes an expensive one also. Mr Wheatley, jeweller, and ex-Mayor of Carlisle, now knows this to Lis cost. It seems that some time ago the worthy tradesman supplied Mrs Hughes, wife of a local clergyman, with some small articles of jewellery on approval. She neither returned them nor paid for them, and in consequence he very naturally became suspicious of the good faith of the transaction. A Trade Protection Society consulted reported the Hugheses were bad payers. This, and some difficulty in ascertaining the Rev Mr Hughes' address, caused Mr Wheatley to conclude husband and wife were a sort of '' long firm." He applied for a warrant, and had the rev gentleman arrested in Leeds, where he was detained from Saturday to Monday, and then sent to Carlisle and subjected to further indignities. At length the case came before the Magistrates, who promptly dismissed it. Mr Hughes, indeed, had a perfect answer to the charge. He wasn't living with his wife either now or at the time the jewellery was ordered. For eighteen months the rev gentleman had been a curate in Leeds. He knew nothing whatever of the goods, which were obtained without his cognisance and authority, and in direct contravention of his wishes.

When Mr Wheatley discovered his blunder he ought to have apologised and withdrawn all insinuations. As he failed to do so, Mr Hughes brought an action for malicious prosecution. The defence fo< dishly justified the arrest, paying .£lO into Court as solathim for the parson's wounded feelings. A Carlisle jury, however, valued the indignities of arrest and of being locked up four days at a higher figure, and awarded Mr Hughes £250 and costs. The experiences of the plaintiff have excited considerable sensation. Mr Hughes deposed that when he was arrested everything was taken away from him, and that he was thrown into a cell with drunken men and women who were uproarious at his expense. He had, moreover, to sleep on a plank bed, which he way compelled to carry on his back down the corridor to the sleeping cell. Yet this is supposed to be a country where men are held to be innocent till proved guilty.

THE WOMAN WHO WOULD SAY

" NO."

This heroine was a pretty peasant maiden resident with her attached parents in a suburb of the Russian city of Kharkoff. Unfortunately, when the father and mother, according to Sclavonic custom, selected a husband for the girl, they chose a small projmetor of the neighbourhood for whom she entertained a special dislike. However, after a severe beating, the damsel submitted to coercion, and in due course a gay wedding party stood at the altar of one of the city churches. The service went on as usual till the priest put the essential question, "Wilt thou take this man?" &c. The girl then replied with an emphatic negative, and all the persuasions of friends and relatives failed to shako her resolution. The wedding party had conseq uentiy to return to the house of the bride's parents. There intimidation failing, the wretched g*irl was soundly beaten, not only by her parents, but by tiie bridegroom's friends. Then back they carried her sore and weeping to the church. Again the crucial question was put, and once again with tears and blushes she cried, "No ; a thousand times, no ! and I appeal for protection to our Holy Church !" The priest at once ranged himself on the side of the girl, who was taken from her irate parents and placed pro tcr,i in a convent. INGOT ROBBERIES. The great silver ingots robbery drama, | on the final act of which the cm-tain will shortly descend, proves the truth of a well-known police axiom. This is that any fool can steal bullion, but that it; takes a, genius to get rid of the stuff. And silver

of course is even more difficult to negotiate than gold. The greatest haul of the sort over known was of course the .SouthEastern Railway bullion robbery, to which James Payn refers in the Illustrated this week. He forgets, however, to add it was planned by a master-mind, a Frenchman who for years baffled our police and who figures as the criminal hero of Major Arthur Griffiths' admirable detective story, " Fast and Loose." Mr Payn says : —The great bullion robbery on the South-Eastern Railway would have remained a dead secret, and been scored as the greatest triumph of crime, but for the falling- out of the thieves among themselves. The robi bery was executed with transcendent skill: the gold had been placed in boxes bound with iron bars, sealed, and placed in iron safes, secured by patent locks ; yet in the transit from London to Boulogne it had been all extracted and shot put iu its stead. For eighteen months the perpetrators remained undiscovered. Wealthy as they were, when one of their confederates, Agar, was in penal servitude for another offence, they cheated him, and omitted to pay his wife and child an annuity they had agreed upon. Furious at their meanness, upon them and disclosed everytiiing:

" how they became acquainted, what part each of them played, how the wax impressions were produced, from whence they made false keys, and how the plunder was divided." The scene in court was most sensational. The other thieves had been officials on the railway —Burgess, tli3 guard of the train, Pierce, a ticketprinter, and Tester, a clerk in the traffic office. The gold was kept in Agar's house, where a furnace was set up. They took the stones from the floor and replaced them with fire-bricks; one of them was produced in court Avith particles of gold about it from the running over of the melting-pot. Before this a hundred ounces of gold had been cut off one of the bars and sold at £3 an ounce; but the cutting seems to have been a difficult job. The unsold gold was buried under the front steps of Pierce's house. Unlike these silver ingots, I do not remember that any of it found its way back to the rightful owners.

The silver bullion robbery has also to some extent reinstated the up-to-date detective in the popular estimation. We had begun to believe that outside Conan Doyle's imagination detectives were fools. But there was quite a flavour of Sherlock Holmes about the ruse adopted to recover the silver bullion. The Egyptian police have, by-the-way, been presented with translations of Holmes' adventures and told to study it as a text-book. N.B. —This is not a joke.

CHRISTIAN NAMES. In the intervals of writing novels, prosecuting 1 the mammoth survey of London, making speeches, and encouraging 1 literary | debutantes, Sir Walter Besant has found 1 time to enquire into the subject of women's ' names in the Middle Ages. As a result, i he now offers parents and guardians a | striking selection of novel Christian names j for infant daughters. "First of all," says i Sir Walter, " Petronilla or Pernella, Sabine j andTheophania—otherwise Tiffany. Others i there are which are quaint, but not very I pretty: Alianora, Allesia, Annullia, Albrica, | Bonejoya, Cassandra, Emota, Evota, Bona, I Imanca, Egidia, Jsonde, Leusta, Diarnanda, ! Gena, Melivia, Lucekyna, Rayna, Juetta, ! Castan'a, Scolastica, Swanilda, Salerna, \ Willelma. Others, again, are simply dreadj ful. Fancy calling your lovely daughter Gunnora, Gunnilda, Magota, Mazera, Orabilia, Richolda, Massilia, Heliwysa, Hawisia, Dionysia, Lecia, Roesia, Wyloholta or Frechesaunchia!" ANOTHER GHOST GONE WRONG. The exposure of Mrs Mellon in Australia has been followed up by a similar episode in New York, in which "Doctor" Henry Rogers has come a " larnal cropper." His spirit turned, so to speak, Queen's evidence, and described how she, "a poi'e, lone widder," with three starving children, accepted with alacrity the doctor's suggestion that she should become a spirit at live dollars a seance. Rogers gave his exhibitions in a flat, into which Mrs Chadwick used to enter after all the visitors i had arrive;!, passing through the hall into I a small room adjoiuing the cabinet, where she effected the necessary metamorphosis. Her duties were not light, for she had to represent spirits of both sexes, for which purpose the doctor provided an ample array of wigs, moustaches and whiskers. Eventually Rogers was bowled out by an enterprising pressman, who forced his way into the doctor's cabinet. The " doctor," who was supposed to be in a trance, came to with startling rapidity and attacked the •journalist with a hatchet, but was overpowered by the press man's colleagues. The funny part of the business is that several spiritualists have written to thank the editor of the newspaper on which the journalist is employed for his services in exposing the impostor. These good people have known fur years that Rogers was a fraud (so they say), but never made the slightest attempt to unmask him, nor did they publicly denounce him in any way until lie was found out. They were, on the contrary, quite willing to receive the converts made by his trickery into their HE TOOK A DOZEN. A British Resident at a native court has to be equal to many occasions. And usually he is. That it is a very cold day when lie " gets left" was exemplified by an occurrence in the Far .Hast the other day. A Brahman went to his Rajah with a polite request for the immediate free gift of a crore of rupees, intimating at the same time that if he didn't get what he asked for he was prepared to slay himself on the threshold of the Rajah's palace. | Now the Rajah at whose gate a Brahman suicides is damned eternally (or its equiva- ! lent), so this particular potentate, having | other uses for his rupees, took counsel with his ItesiJent. The latter suggested that a. durbar should be held, ai which the Brahman should appear. The Brahman did turn up and in reply to the Resident's questions stated that he wanted the money to build a temple, and that he was fully resolved to carry out his threat if the crore was not handed over. Thereupon the Resident handed the Brahman a wickedly long knife and bade him shorten his life then and there, or take a dozen. But the Brahman said that if he died his death would lie not at the Rajah's but at the Resident's door, and the latter he knew quite well would be entirely unaffected by the circumstances. So he took the dozen, and now the resident is reckoned by the Rajah and his sporting suite as a Solomon, j

society

NEXT, PLEASE ! The beasts that perish can still give man a few joints. An ostrich, for instance, would swallow a yard of galvanised iron piping without a thought before or after the act. He would not want the pipe filed down to powder, nor ask anyone to bet 500 francs that he couldn't do the trick; nor would ho require to adjourn to a cafe to

make the meal, or want a hundred people to see him perform. All these preliminaries preceded the galvanised iron pipe feed of a young Parisian the other day. He put the powder into five glasses of beer and drank one glas3 every ten minutes, playing cards meanwhile to prevent unhappy thoughts. And when all five had vanished the crowd cheered him to the echo. Perhaps they cheered because the powdei was all safely inside the young man, but more probably from gratification at the thought that it was not inside themselves. The young fellow is reported to have suffered no inconvenience from his meal, so the moral seems to be that some men can swallow more than others. Some, of course, will experience a difficulty in swallowing this yarn, but ithas appeared in at least half a dozen papers, and must therefore be true.

PIANO POWER

The amount of power expended in playing on a piano has recently been'worked out. The calculations may not be altogether accurate, but they are at least interesting. The young lady who cannot lift a scuttle of coals will be surprised to learn that the playing of one short passage in Chopin's last study in C minor requires a pressure force of some three tons, and also that if she plays Chopin for an hour on end she will have to exercise'a total pressure of from twelve to eighty-four tons. It would be interesting to know the average tonnage of an hour's Wagner calculated on these lines. When a pianist is playing fortissimo a force of six pounds is sometimes thrown upon a single note to produce a solitary effect. What wonder then that pianists possess such strength in their fingers and wrists ? Of Paderewski 'tis said he can crack a plate glass pane half an inch thick by merely placing one hand upon it as if upon a piano keyboard, and striking it sharply with his middle finger. Which is a pretty tall tale to swallow. OUR WONDERFUL QUEEN. What a wonderful woman is the great lady whom Mr Kipling's Tommy Atkins disrespectfully style? " The Widder at Windsor." From the number and nature of her accomplishments the unsophisticated man might reasonably harbour a suspicion that Her Majesty had lived a great deal longer than the Almanacs give her credit for. Almost every week we hear of some fresh mental achievement of our gracious Sovereign. That she has an excellent memory for faces and possesses a fondness for music we have long been aware, but a lady's paper (ladies' papers generally get the most exclusive news regarding royalty) informs us that the Queen has not only "an excellent ear for music,"but that "her memory is so acute that she can recall exactly how a piece should be placed if she has not heard it for years." The Prince of Wales is si uilarly accredited, and the information is supplemented with the statement that Madame Calve remarked, after singing at Windsor, that i he Queen "knew more about music than nine out of ten of her subjects." Which was but a modest compliment, if you analyse it. Baroness Bloomfield tells how, on one occasion, the Queen desired her to sing, and she, "in fear and trembling," sang one of the Queen's favourite airs, but omitted a shake at the end. Her Majesty detected the omission, and smilingly asked Lady Normanby, "Doesn't your sister shake?" " Oh, yes, ma'am," replied Lady N., " she is shaking all over." M'yes. I know these royalty stories —in fact, I've made some myself.

THE MAN WHO BROKE THE BANK

> Dalziel is responsible for this story. MiFrank Gardner and Mr Woolfe Joel, two 1 Londoners, who are better known in the ■ city than in society, were staying at the Hotel de Paris, Nice, and arranged to walk from La Turbie to Nice for =6IOO a side, on condition that the winner should immediately proceed to the Casino and place the whole of the loser's money on the red for joint account. Joel won the walk by seven minutes, and with " an independent air " proceeded to the Casino and placed c£loo on the red. The first bet was successful, and following up his luck, Joel made coup after cov.p, till at the end of half an hour's play he was the richer by 380,000 francs, and had broken the bank. He played no less than 12 consecutive coups on the red, and three maximums round the figure nine. Like wise men, Messrs Joel and Gardner left Nice next day. "TRIPOLO"—QUJTE PARISIAN. The Paris correspondent of the Daily Telegraph sends some remarkable information regarding a new game recently tried in Paris. This pastime, an invention of the Omnium Cycling Club, is called "Tripolo." It is formed after the plan of [ polo proper, but bicycles instead of horses ! are used, and many elements of football and hockey are introduced. The ground J required for the game is 150 metres long I and 40 wide, and four players constitute a I side. The play is controlled by an umpire I mounted on a tricycle. At a trial game 1 the other day it became evident that " Tripolo " contained all the excitement of a hotly contested football match, and would be a fine game for using up players and umpires. The latter in the trial game ought to have been placed in a captive balloon, so that he would have been able to officiate in the return match, which it is ' understood -will be played in bath chairs | at the earliest opportunity. - j