LADIES' GOSSIP.

Otago Witness, Issue 2675, 21 June 1905, Page 74

LADIES' GOSSIP.

—To have known poverty and to b< the mother of perhaps the richest baby ii the world is no common conjunction ; bu 1 an example is given in a recent Mun;-ey Senator Clark, the "Montana millionain copper king, fell in love with his ward Miss Ada La Chapelle. She was one o: the daughters of a French-Canadian phy sician who died in Butte, Montana, i dozen years ago, leaving his family without resources. The copper Croesus befriended them, and Ada," a young girl oJ remarkable promise, was sent to Paris tc perfect her education. The best singing teachers in France were engaged for her ; linguists were ushered in and out bearing grammars and text -books; modistes brought their finest creations, and the daughter of the western doctor wished foi nothing that she did not receive. In the meantime, on Fifth avenue, in New York, the senator was erecting a palace of impressive proportions, a majestic pile oi marble and steel, one of the niost magnificent and costly structures on that splendid street. In July, 1904, he made a trip to Paris and brought back with him his two-year-old daughter and her mother, formerly Miss Ada La Chapelle, now Mrs William A. Clark. It was a secret that the senator had married his ward three years before. "The Copper King,'' adds our contemporary, "will not be lonely in his great marble palace, and Fifth avenue will prepare to watch the debut of a new and interesting figure in societj', who has 60 or 70 million dollars to draw upon for ammunition if she cares to campaign for social honours." — Tiy this : Take the number of your living brothers ; double this amount ; add to it three ; multiply the result by five ; add to the number of living sisters ; multiply the result by 10 ; add number of deaths " of brothers and sisters' ; subtract 150 from the result. The right hand figure will be the number of deaths ; the nii-ddlc figure frill be the number of living sisters ; the left hand figure will show number of living brothers. — A correspondent of the Liverpool Post is greatly distressed at a recent pronouncement in the Lancet to the effect that dinner table talk nowadays is mostly made up of discussions as to the complaints from which the various guests are suffering. He wants to know whether it is likely that in the near future the "musical evening" will give place to the "medical evening," whereat the guests, instead of singing or playing, will read little treatises on th© "Premonitory symptoms of spinal meningitis," or "Removal of the cerebrum as a cure for corns." He has also a grim foreboding that before very long the giving of wedding presents will acquire a new terror, and that instead of the plated toastrack or the hand-painted flower bowl of to-day, vre shall be expected to send a glass jar containing some weird-looking object preserved in spirits. He has, moreover, visions of a new scheme of wall decoration, wherein the ancestral sabres and the Soudanese spears will be replaced by skulls and crossbones, and the charming little water-colours by DAuber or Smearie will give way to diagrams of the alimentary canal or the respiratory system. In fact, as he gloomily observes, there seems every possibility that we shall shortly be living in a sort of glorified hospital, one-half Buffering from, melancholia. Even the dinner table problem might be a less terrible alternative. —If you see the fair sex abused in cold print you may be reasonably sure that a lady is at the bottom of it. Here is Mrs Henry Dudeney upon her sisters: — "To man has been given the gift of perfect friendship. Women merely keep up a spurious emotion by frequent tasteless kisses." "Tasteless kisses" has an unhappy sound, certainly. But would a tasty kiss be any better (asks the Daily Telegraph)? After all, the customary kiss proves nothing in particular, good or bad, and the only sort of emotion it awakes is as to whether it will discompose a carefullyarranged complexion. For the matter of that, though John Doe would be rather overcome if he were embraced by Richard Roe, Fritz makes no trouble' about kissing Otto. On .the (doubtless inferior) Continent men indulge ih "frequent tasteless kisses" as well as their sisters, nor is there reason to suppose that the osculation prevents them being "perfect friends." Why should the same "tasteless kiss," provided always that it be judiciously planted, prevent the amity of English women? — A French doctor and a French architect have "put their heads together" and conceived the idea of a revolving house, with the object of having houses which shall give the maximum amount of sunshine and the minimum amount of wind. At Eaubonne, in the Pyrenees, may already be seen a series of kiosks mounted on pivots. They may he moved at will and in such a manner that the front may be either turned towards the sun or sheltered from stormy winds. — Confetti throwing, which is now so general, owed its origin, strangely enough, to all accident. A firm was engaged" in printing and turning out thousands of almanacks in which eyelet-holes were punched. The tiny coloured discs were thrown about by the workgirls, and, as the proprietor saw the decorative possibilities of the fragments, he tried his idea. It caught on to such an extent that he soon gave up printing and devoted himself to confetti making. —It was a fashionable function, and *he orchestra had been playing somewhat loudly. A well-known Englishman was discussing fche friendly relations of England and America with a very attractive American woman. The" music stopped > suddenly, and in the silence which followed the Englishman was heard to remark in . heartfelt accents, " And the more v/e- ] know one another the more dearly we j must love one another." . Both hastened to offer esplanations as ia the cniireix

political character of their remarks, Tni' nothing could stop the laughter of t}-t delighted audience. B 1 —The Duke and Duchess of Somerset x who lent their beautiful house in Gros k venor-square the other day for the concerl for one of the Queen's pet charities, prefej ' when possible to spend their time ,-i Maiden Bradley. Town life has but little ' f charm for a couple who spent an adventurous youth in far-off lands, camping ir f the open, cooking their own meals, aivi 1 , exploring the forest primeval. But thai ' , was long ago — soon after the Duke, diet ' Mr Algernon St. Maur, had married 'Miss f Susan Mackinnon — and it is many years ' , since the Mrs St. Maur of those days Lad ! , to take her place as premier Duchess oi - England. The "pride of the Seymours," f : up to the time of the present Duke end i ' Duchese of Somerset, was a proverb in ihe » land. Of " the proud Duke," who died in • i 1748, it is told that when his second wife . once touched* him familiarly on ihe shoulder with her fan, he turned indig- ' ( nantly and said : '■ My first Duchess was ; , a Percy, and she never took such a ' j liberty !" When travelling he caused all ■ the roads to be cleared until his carriage should pass. — A well-known Society Parisian woman ' has just designed a novel set of playingcards, which contains, instead of the 1 stereotyped faces of the king, queen, and knave, artistically-coloured pictures of men and women prominent in social, literary, 1 charitable, and industrial life. In the the four queens, of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, are represented by wellknoNvn social leaders and beauties — one holds a high place in literature, another , is prominent in philanthropy, and another 1 is celebrated for her connection with an i influential patriotic society. The queens are represented holding in their hands fans of delicate design and workmanship. The four kings rejwesent well-known men in the field of industry and finance, who hold sceptres indicative of their particular line of endeavour ; while the knaves portray four lenowned inventors, with a design illustrating the particular invention which made each famous. The backs of the cards contain the tricolour — red, white, and blue — the whole being very artistic, and a decided improvement on the playingcards heretofore so universally in use. The portraits are excellent likenesses, and cleverly executed in colour. — It is said that among the hideous debris found on the scene of the assassination of the Grand Dxike Sergius was a stone perfectly black in colour which is -siipposed to be the large sapphire worn in a ring by the Grand Duke on that ' terrible day. The black hue •is asserted to be the effect of the chemicles used in ' the bomb. Sapphires are, next to diamonds, the hardest stones known. Ihey are what experts term ': dichroic," and the colour of the stones may be resolved imo an ultramarine blue and a yellowish green. But to the unaided eye no purer, truer hue exists than that of the sapphire. It ; varies from a pale blue to the deepest in- ; digo ; the most valuable stones are Ihe ! colour of a cornflower. Some specimens ; found in Ceylon are slightly cloudy, and when cut en caboqhon display an opalescent star of six rays, whence they 01 c termed star sapphires or asterias. Our 1 finest sapphires come from Ceylon, although lately exceedingly good specimens have been found in Burmah and Siam. ' The gold-bearing drifts of New South , Wales also yield a harvest ; but these stones are generally too dark to be of ; first value. A coarse kind has been found j in Carolina, but scarcely sufficiently fh.e Ito be used for jewellery. Some mouths ' since we saw in the workshop of a Cairo ■ jeweller a wooden bowl two-thirds full of the finest sapphires. The glory of those gleaming gems shining in the rays of brilliant light which found their way into 1 the interior of the vaulted place was indescribable. An old Persian workman had been busy detaching the jewels from iheir settings, and he let the shining points of j vivid blue fall through his yellow fingers j as he swept them together, and dropped them into the bowl. '" For sale ? ~No. They were the property of the mother of His Highness the Khedive " — the most ' powerful lady in the realm. She wished to j have " all obtainable sapphires set to ! that they might be fastened as a trimming i upon her jacket. And the jeweller brought forward a sketch, done in water-colour of ; the effect the Princess wished to achieve. !It is one of the Princess's favourite ! amusements, we are told, arranging &ud , planning the re-setting of her jewels. ; Sometimes she will invent really tasteful combinations ; but generally the effect aimed at is a mere lavish display of the greatest number and the greatest size. Many of these special jewels, we are told, had been bought by Ismail, the late Khedive, for enormous sums.