NEWS IN BRIEF.

Colonist, Volume XXVIII, Issue 4174, 25 June 1885, Page 4

NEWS IN BRIEF.

According to the ' Australasian Insurance Becord,' fires' in Adelaide during the last 12. months are unparalleled in the Colonies. The unusual fire lons is accompanied by stagnation in trade and general depression. La other words, a desperate community is selling out to the insurance companies in order to avoid bankruptcy. This is obviously true in' the case of the lumber merchants, Their business has been exceedingly dull, and the number of lumber-yards burned in Adelaide has been "perfectly startling," and in each case there was heavy insurances. Co-operation is going ahead among the settlers in the Auckland district. The North New Zealand Cooperative Association is only one year old, and yet it has donebusiness to the amount of £25,000, thus turning over its capital of £3000 eight times. The directors propose . erecting slaughtering yards near Waikato sending the carcases to Auckland and selling them to local butchers. One Sunday a great catastrophe occurred at the Zoological Gardens. There is there an elephant who eats buns off one's hat. A certain noble lord, who had heard of this, bought a bun, put it into his hat, gracefully presented the dish to the elephant. But unluckily this happened to be ihe! wrong elephant, and one whose education had been neglected, for he took the hat and bun together, placed them within his capacious mouth, and munched them contentedly amid the inextinguishable laughter of the onlookers. The Bill for extending the hours of polling at all parliamentary and municipal elections in England from eight o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night has passed the House of Lords, and commenting on the fact the ' Daily News' says : —" When we compare the difficulty Sir Charles Dilko had in persuading Parliament to extends the hours in, London, only a few years ago, with the quiet passage of the Bill in the present]session, we get some measure of the increased imfiuence which the Franchise Act has already given to the working classes. There is a desire among all parties to give the new voters a fair chance of exercising the franchise." Some school committees appear to have curious ideas about the functions of the Education Board. One account forwarded by a Poverty Bay committee to the Hawke's Bay Board was for various pots and pans for the master, an egg-poacher being included in the list. It is hardly necessary to add that the account was not passed. A novel export is about to leave Christchurch for England. Mr W. McKeever. an old resident of Canterbury, who is leaving for England, is taking with him a Swede turnip weighing no less than 241b. It is of the variety known as Shirving'a purple topped, and was grown from seed supplied by Mr Wm, Wilson, of Cashel street. The; export jvill be packed in sawdust, and is for exhibition in England. Joseph Allen, who had turned his hundredth year, breathed his last in the Asylum for. the Infirm and Destitute, Parramatta (Sydney), on Sunday, May 31. Allen was a native of the North of England, and is said to have been the first waterman who plied on the Parramatta Eiver. He retained his faculties to the last. These have been over 1,200 bags of maize sent away from Opotiki for the Auckland market, during ten days. An exchange says that the proproprietors of the New Zealand Clothing Factory are having pictures of all their branches taken with a view of having the whole of them mounted on a shield for exhibit at the Industrial Exhibition. The firm have twentyfive branches, and the shield will be enclosed in a frame 12ft. square; Teutotalism is making strides in the Colony, surely. The revenue derived from spirits during the last financial year shows a falling off of £25,716. The juvenile Societies in connection with the Ancient Order of Foresters in England number 58,777 members, with £66,776 funds. One of the three sets of powerful pumping engines for forcing water through fifty miles of piping in the Soudan has been satisfactorily tested at Woolwich. Speaking of the departure of a female temperance orator for . Sydney, the Napier ' Telegraph ' says : —Mrs Leavitt leaves for Sydney shortly via Auckland. She will have a splendid field for her talents in the New South Wales capital, which is about the hardest drinking and moat immoral place in the colonies.