PERSONAL NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2106, 5 July 1894, Page 48

PERSONAL NOTES.

Cornelius Vanderbilt has given £200,000 for religious purposes in two year?.

The Czarewitch of Russia is fond of Rider Haggard's stories, and delights in all books of adventure.

Professor T. K. Gheyne, the eminent Biblical scholar of Oxford, has the sight of only one eye, and he cannot use that except in natural light. And yet he has written a large number of books requiring an immense amount of original investigation.

Mr F. 0. Selous, the famous African hunter, ha^ shot more than 100 elephants and at least 20 lions. On one occasion he accomplished the unprecedented feat of killing three full-grown lions with four Bbots. The flesh of the lion, Mr Sslous declares, ia excellent eating.

Mr Robert Louis Stevenson is 43 years old. Mr Meredith and Mrs Oliphant are each G5. Mr Besant is 55, Mr Hardy and Miss Broughtcn are each 53, Mr Buchanan is 52, Grant Allen is 45, Eider Haggard is 37, Mr Barrie and Mr Doyle are each 33, Mr Kipling is 29, and Mr Quiller-Oouch is 28 years old.

When commanding the Galatea, some years ago, the Dnke of Edinburgh called in plain clothes on an admiral, who rebuked him with the stiff greeting : " I should have been very happy to receive your Royal Highness on any other occasion, but unhappily at this moment I am expecting a visit from the captain of the Galatea." The Dake went back to his ship and put on his uniform.

The death is reported of the Abbe le Rebours, parish priest of the Madeleine. The deceased refused bishoprics 42 times since 1871. The salary at the Madeleine is a handsome one, and the fees to which he was entitled were estimated at from BO,OOOfr to 100,000f r a year. Thie parish is the wealthiest in Paris, and he had so many invitations every day to lunches and dinners at great houses that he was often puzzled which to choose among them.

Gounod was extremely fond of poßing. It is said that he delighted to receive visitors in the dim religious light of his magnificent music room, while, clad in a costume of black velvet, he ran his fingers dreamily over the keyboard of the organ there, above which a large crucifix was conspicuously fixed. " A wave of the white hand bade you be silent," says a writer who once witnessed this im-

pressive scene, "and it was not until the last strains of the solemn mass on which he was engaged had died away that he began to talk in measured and mysterious accents." Mr Edwin Lestsr Arnold, whose "Constable of St. Nicholas " Messrs Chafcto and Windus are bringing out, is a son of Sir Edwin Arnold, and, like his father, is on the stafi of the Daily Telegraph. He is a man of about 40 years of age, with very much his father's features. He Is a dark man, with a full grey eye. Sir Edwin, if anything, is the younger-seeming man of the two. Mr Arnold, who first made his mark with the novel, "Phra, the Phoenician," which ran through the Illustrated London News, is a Cheltenham College boy. Mr George Manville Fenn, who has recently varied his writing of books of adventure for boys by bringing out a novel, " Tiger-lilies, the Story of Two Passions," is an astonishingly young-looking man for his age, whioh is approaching the alloted term of man. He is a tall man, with a slim, active, youthful-looking figure, regular featurea, a florid complexion, a fair, handsome, silky beard, and bright blue eyes. Mr Fenn, who is a man of a charming disposition, is fond of the society of his fellow-authors, and may frequently be seen at the Savage Club. Mr Arthur Roberts, while dining once with Howard Paul, told him the following story : — " The comedian had a lad in his service, not overladen with aptitude, who had no knowledge of geography or the remotest notion of distance. One day his master said to the page, • Did you tell that awful bore who called that I had gone to Calcutta ? ' •Ye 3, sir,' replied the boy; «I said you started this morning.' 'Good boy. What did he say 7 ' The boy's reply was charming : ' He wished to know when you'd return, and I told him I didn't think you'd be back till after lunch, sir 1 "

Ibsen, like Lord Woleeley and other eminent men, has evidently a vein of superstition in his nature. On his writing table in a tray was a small wooden bear, a little black imp for holding a match, and two or three little cats and rabbits in copper. "What are these funny little things?" queried the visitor. " I never write a single line of my dramai," was the reply, " unless that tray and its occupants ire before me on the table ; I could nob write without them. It may seem strange— perhaps it is ; but I cannot write without them," he repeated; " but why I use them is my own secret." " The pictures they publish of me," says Mr R. L Stevenson, ia speaking of American papers, " vary considerably. They represent every type from the most godlike creatures to the criminal classes ; and their descriptions of me vary in proportion — from a man with a 'noble bearing' to a • blighted boy.' I don't mind what they say as a general rule, only I did object when somewhere in the Statei£an interviewer wrote : « A tall willowy column supported his classic head, from which proceeded a hacking cough.' I could not forgive that I " This amusing paragraph is taken from the English Illustrated Magazine.

When Mr Douglas Sladen first went to Australia Jbe was the guest of Mr Philip Russell, of Carngham, one of the great " Western District ". squatters. In the course of a driving tonr Mr Russell's son took him to another of Mr Russell's stations — Langywilly—situated in Snake Valley, near Beaufort, a town of, perhaps, only 3000 inhabitants now, though it had 30,000 and more ia the gold boom of the e*rly days. They arrived there about 8 a.m., and Mr Sladen noticed that breakfast had been laid for him at a sort of writing table. *• Where you are sitting," said Mr Rassell, " Henry Kingsley sat when he was working' at" 'Geoffrey Hamlyn.' "

In Mr Irving's Harvard lecture on " Individuality," he told a pathetic story of a double of himself. He had received a letter from a gentleman in Paris, asking for a little temporary assistance on the ground that Mb life had become a burden to him from his painful resemblance to the speaker. Wherever he went, he complained, the people pointed to him, saying : " That's Irving, the actor." As some compensation ha solicited the loan of lOOfr. Mr Irving's reply was very much to the point. His advice to his alter ego— couched, of coarse, in courteous circumlocution — was, " Get your 'air cut."

The special Neal Dow number of The Woman's Signal contains an interesting message by the nonagenarian Prohibitionist, explaining/among other thing?, why he has lived*ao long. He comes, it seems, of a long-lived race, two of his ancestors having reached 100, and one having passed 104. " For at least three' generations my progenitors lived the frugal, quiet, well-ordered lives enjoined by the rules of the Society of Friends, of which they were member?, and they transmitted to me the family tendency of longevity, unimpaired by dissipation or excess." The portrait of the General gives the impression of a man in full possession of hi? intellectual faculties.