NEWS AND NOTES.

Waikato Independent, Volume VII, Issue 464, 23 January 1908, Page 6

NEWS AND NOTES.

After bewailing {he fact that nine of lur chickens had been stolen during the Right, a San Francisco woman picked up a pocket hook containing £IBO in notes and gold which the thief had dropped. li r Paul Taylor, the I jondon magistrate, says the longer one sits in a police court, the more one realises of what little value statistics are as indicating the amount or crime committed. For every crime that is punished, probably twenty go undetected and unpunished. On the same day that Madame Duplonys celebrated the 104th anniversary of her birth, her eldest son, M. Duplonys, and Ins wife celebrated their golden wedding ; her grand-daughter and her husband, M. Gossart, their silver wedding ; and her great grand-daughter, Mdfie Gossart, was married to M. Muller. The famous bubble fountain which was erected at the Christchurch Exhibition at a cost of £'2so, and which after a brief and inglorious career was left in solitary abandonment, was disposed of at auction last week for 255. And yet people say the Exhibition was mismanaged ! As showing how confined arc the capabilities of some farm hands, Mr Masiin told the Conciliation Board at Geraldine that he know a man who had been on a farm for 29 years, and while asked to catch some iambs whiie another man tailed them, he could not do it, saying that he had never been used to it. “ The mind of the average English worker is so absolutely absorbed with sports in general, and football in particular, that we can hardly expect him to find lime for the more serious pursuit of business.”—Pall Mall Gazette. Hands are reported scarce for harvest work in Canterbury, A visitor to Timaru informed a contemporary that dozens of able-bodied men could be seen loafing on the wharf at Timaru waiting to get a chance to discharge cargo from calling vessels. They might get one or two days’ work a week and loafed the rest of the time. They would not go into the country. Two years ago Sir James Crichton Brown was sent on a mission to Jamaica, in connection with the colonial office. While at Kingston he had an encounter with a coloured but very humble official. , Sir James is an ardent Scot and was keenly interested in the Scottish popuation of the island. “Do you have many Scotchmen in these parts ? ” be asked of the official. The darkey thought for a moment, and then answered : “ Not many, just few—but enough.” Sir James collapsed. Extraordinary evidence was given at an inquest on November j-Bth at Coinbrook, Bucks, on the body of Horace Lrookman, a young man of independent means, who, during a game of draughts with his brother-in-. Jaw, asked the latter how much cyanide of potassium would kill a man. Later he went to his brother-in-law’s bedroom smoking a cigarette, and smilingly said : “ I have done it.” When asked “How ?” he said he had wrapped the poison in a cigarette paper, so that it should nob burn his. mouth, adding that he might as well lie hown and die in comfort. Within a little while he was dead. The brother-in-law said that the deceased had taken sufficient cyanide of potassium to poison forty people. A verdict of suicide while temporarily insane was returned. A leading farmer in Poverty Bay told the Gisborne Times that the district was in for a prolonged drought. He based his prognostication on the unusually early appearance of the insect pests. In sinking a mast for grass seed harvesting the other a ay, he found myriads of cricket grubs a foot beneath the surface of the ground, and no surer indication of drought could exist than the early appearance of crickets. Again, he stated, the bot Hies, which usually did not appear in numbers until well after Christmas, were very troublesome, and had been seen in large numbers for some considerable rime past. Horse-stingers were also very plentiful The early appearance of these insects, he states, was a sure indication that we were in for a repetition of the drought which caused such havoc to farmers in Otago a short time ago. The Japanese Embassy on November 23 received a cheque for £5,869,440 19s 6d from the Russian Ambassador in London. This was sent by the Russian Government as the balance of a sum due for the maintenance of the Russian prisoners by Japan during the late war. Immense as this sum was, it would have been still larger but for the fact that there was a small contra account for the Japanese prisoners seized by the European country. Little ceremony marked the closing of this historic account. The Secretary of the Russian Embassy called at the Japanese Embassy, and was at once shown into the room of the Ambassador, to whom he handed a sealed envelope containing the cheque and a letter from Count Benckendorff. The largest cheque on record was for £11,008,875, the first instalment of the Chinese indemnity to Japan.