Items.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XX, Issue 6331, 12 August 1895, Page 4

Items.

A correspondent writes to a London piper :—I went last week to Stonehenge, and came home quite shocked at such a scene of neglect and desolation. Many of the fine columns, some of them 24ft long, are lying heaped one on the other on the ground, while most of them that are standing are quite out of perpendicular and will soon follow the others, and the whole thing will then be nothing but a heap of stonc3. Can it be possible that we are going to allow the finest Druidical monument in Europe to perish by neglect ? We have more than one archaeological society in London, but there is no sentiment or veneration for antiquity that would preserve Stonehenge from the destroying hand of Time? It would not cost very much to raise some of those splendid monoliths from the ground and to restore what remain standing to the perpendicular. No one need be shocked at the idea of restoring Stonehenge ; for, I would ask, in what state would our cathedrals and other ancient buildings be if they were not constantly kept in repair 1 The Chinese burglar takes an ingredient of his own, burns it, and blows the smoke through the keyhole of the bedroom where the master of the house is asleep. The fumes dull the senses of the victim just enough to make him helpless, while at the same time permitting him to hear and see everything that goes on in the room. The orange crop in the Whangarei district is expected to be very large this season, the trees being very heavily laden. The St. Michael variety is the one which succeeds so well there. The tooth-billed pigeon is extremely rare and quite unique among the feathered tribes which now inhabit the earth. The lower mandible is deeply cleft into three distinct teeth near its tip. The bird seems to be closely related to the now extinct Dodo, and is remarkable for the fact that it is only within the last twenty years that it has taken to flying.