MISCELLANEOUS.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 3625, 23 August 1901, Page 4

MISCELLANEOUS.

One of the effects of Western civilisation in Japan is that native newspapers have taken to writing "editorials" in English "as she is wrote." Here is a ,wi«rd example taken from the columns _of a weekly newspaper published in Tokio:— "Oonr foreign policy is but a childplay amount to nothing. Our new Minister for Foreign Affairs is a University (Imperial) man, and consequently he has all the sympathy and support of that -university. But the new Minister seems not of ability, so our Foreign policy ends no policy, but of disgrace and shame." M. Jean Legoff, a well known Parisian "society" man, has been arrested under ludicrous circumstances. A police agent, seeing a man in raga begging from a- passer by, approached him, and, to his astonishment, recognised a .frequenter of fashionable clubs and social gatherings. On being taken before the police commissary, M. Legoff acknowledged" that he made a comfortable income as a mendicant. His daily takings reached from 20f. to"' 30L Several hundred franc notes and a cheque book were found in his possession. He is liable to a month's imprisonment for swindling.

A new fashion has been set to London ladies. Queen Alexandra has been driving in the Park lately with one of her small grandchildren upon her knee. In consequence of her appearance with the child, every woman in 'London. seems to have considered it necessary.-. to do like wise;, and as every woman cannot possibly have. a. small child to take, about,, they are " borrowed" from friends for the occasion. Thet number of children, from a baby.in arms to a child of six or seven, appearing in, Hyde Park every afternoon is amazing.

The British branch of the Pittsburg Westihghouse Engineering and Manufacturing Company, on the Trafford estate, Manchester, is fast approaching completion,' thanks to the enterprise of Mr James C. Stuart, and his seven American. assistants who came over to hurry things along. The building's and plant will cost six and a half million dollars. The works will be covered with forty acres of roof, and will employ 6000 hands. There will be 32 miles of railway within the walls. A village for workmen has already sprung up; the sjreets are indicated by numbers in New York fashion.

The sudden passage from confinement to liberty has had a painful effect, says the London " Daily Mail," on poor Charles Lillywhite. Until his release the tension seems to have kept him up. Now that it is all over he has collapsed. •" He doesn't seem able to realise that he is free," said his brother to a "Daily Mail" representative. "If I wished to I could pull hira about just as I liked: If I say 'Come here,' he'll answer, 'Yes, I'm coming,' and come. You can't treat an innocent man like a criminal for close on eight months and expect him to recover from it all at once. He seems as if he were in a dream." Mr Lillywhite is under medical treatment, but it is doubtful whether he will ever be the same man again. His • brother considers that years have been taken off the end of his life.

The • Americans are turning their attention'next to the dockyards in England, and naturally. London is receiving .first notice..-' The president of the Atlantic Transport Co. (Mr Baker) announces a plan by which £2,000,000 will be spent on docks. in London. In making this announcement he says the British are antiquated in their ways of doing things. Iq costs 3s to handle freights in Englandj where it only costs. Is in New York. The English unload into a barge, take the merchandise to the weighing place, unload, weigh, ,and then load into another barge. Their wharves are poorly arranged, their warehouses too distant, and their labour unions will not permit the use oi machinery. Mr Baker predicts that the Americans and Germans will soon kill the supremacy of Britain unless she wakes up.

What., makes a heat wave in New York particularly obnoxious is the humidity. The dry heat of Bechuanaland, for instance, is bearable except for an hour or two round mid-day; but the wet heat of New York, like that of Colombo, is too much for anyone. It moistens everything you wear and everything you touch, covers the very walls with perspiration, unshackles all your joints, and makes you tired out; biiu Jistless before the day has begun. Add to this the fumes of a thousand underground furnaces, wafted generously in your face, wherever you walk, and kept from escaping by a cordon of gigantic buildings, and one might argue with confidence that,, of all the large cities of the West, New, York is the only one that at a pinch could'not be turned into a summer resort. In California, for instance, where the thermometer rises to heights undreamed of in New York, cases of sunstroke are almost unknown; while four or five days of hot weather in Manhattan Island kills on an average about 120 people and over 200 horses .

Mr Jeremiah Perry, a well-known miller, at Parkes (New South Wales), passed away wiih awful suddenness on August Bth. He had just delivered some goods to a customer, to whom he was chatting about the crops, when he said that his head was swimming round, and sank to the ground a corpse.