GENERAL ITEMS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXI, Issue 1200, 2 February 1922, Page 3

GENERAL ITEMS.

Better estimates' of the damage done by the Omoana cloudburst have now been received by the Eltham County Council. The county engineer states it will cost between £SOOO and £BOOO to repair the main roads alone, and the cost of repairing all the roads in the devastated area would not be over-estimated at £20,000.

A strange story of a business settlement is told from a township no great distance from the Hauraki Plains (says an exchange). Two partners in a business quarrelled, and one offered the other a certain sum to sell out his portion of the business. This) sum could not be found, so it was agreed that they should fight, and the winner would have full possession of the business. They fought, but after a fierce encounter the result was a draw. The two men, it is also reported, are still partners.

Sir Arthur Pearson, whose death wast recorded in the cablegrams a few weeks 1 ago, had relays of secretaries, and while one opened letters and read them aloud the other took down the shorthand replies. “A cheque for £IOO from Mr Carnegie,” read one secretary. Instantly Sir Arthur dictated to the other secretary : “ Telegram, Andrew Carnegie, Skibo Castle. Cheque received £IOO. Surely a mistake. —Arthur Pearson.” The bluntness of the man was 1 one of the secrets of his charm and his success.

j The Sydney correspondent of the j Auckland Observer writes : “ One of the local papers is laughing at Takapuna for its bathing restrictions. The Telegraph invites some of the councillors who have ruled -that members of the Royal Life-Saving Club should wear overcoats when not in the water, to come across to Sydney and see the way they do it at Bondi. Actually, Sydney would send Takapuna blind in the matter of bathing costumes. You see people here motoring up Pitt street in bathing clothes, and it is common to board a tram, four miles from the beach, and find people travelling this; distance in their scant sea dress.” An ex-sergeant has made some cal- ' eolations to impress on the minds of his friends the -immensiity of the loss of life in the Great War. The official list of British dead, taking the Empire. was nearly a million. Marching in fours at intervals of a yard, these dead soldiers would form a column over 120 miles long, or from Paddington to beyond Bristol. Marching pasit in fours at the rate of four miles an hour they would take over 30 hours to pass a given point. If 100 of their bodies had been placed in a railway truck, and 40 trucks made into a trainload, it would have required about 230 trains to carry them away. This is the cost of war to one of the fighting nations, and 18 nations were deep in it.