HOME ITEMS.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XX, Issue 5776, 23 November 1885, Page 2

HOME ITEMS.

The excellent qualities of the Brunner coal on the Greymouth coast have been commented on in the Colliery Guardian, which meutions, in the ' course of aa article on the coal industries of the antipodes, that the comparative illuminating properties of the coals from New South Wales and the West Coast of New Zealand are in the following .proportions 1 : — New South Wales produced, per ton, 9000 ft of gaa ; Wesc Coast of New Zealand, 11,928 ft of gas. This faot will probably not be without its influence in connection with the raising of the fund for the construction of the Eaat arad West Coast Railway, which runa in close proximity to these rich coal deposits. The English correspondent of an Auckland paper writes as follows:— A Conservative statesman says that his party have nothing to fear from the general election. That would imply that they are prepared for the crushing defeat awaiting them. If th<>v have nothing to fear it can only be becaus • they have nothing to hope for. Blessed is he that expficteth nothing, for verily he shall not be disappointed. In this country the prospects of Toryism are not bright. The new electorate go out of their way in all directions to voluntarily declare their determination to vote for the party which won them the franchise ; and with such recruitment the Liberal candidates ought to win in every division. Every day makes that happy result more probable. This brings me to the new power in the land — the agricultural laborer, a man to-day well educated as to the seorecy of the ballot box, and who will most assuredly pay off that old score he has against the Tory parish parson and parish squire, who conjointly have kept him in a state of serfdom for years many.

Before Sir Charles Dilke'a Marriage the London correspondent of an Irish paper wrote that Sir Charles was a suitor for the lady's hand before her first marriage, and, her late husband being aware of it, he desired that after his death his widow should marry Sir Charles, the Rev Mark Pattisou enjoining his brother to see the lady through her widowhood and into the second wedlock. Mrs Pattiaon was left a fortune of £40,000. Mr Frank Pattison was to give the bride away in discharge of the trust confided to him by his late brother, and provide the wedding feast and propose tbe health of the bride, Mr Joseph Chamberlain to be the best man. The correspondent thinks that not much more will be heard of the Crawford case. At the present moment, says the "Home News " of October 2nd, the Conservatives are placed in an exceedingly awkward position. The rigid enforcement of the law of the land on the other side of 3t, George's ! Channel against the law of the Land League will lose them the support of the Parnellites, and also of that portion of the electorate which, not b^ing pledged to Mr Parnell, follows implicitly the lead of the Riman Catholic Hierarchy presided over by Archbishop Walsh, who has just accentuated in a very significant way the claim of the Church to political allegiance. Yet if the Tories cannot make up their minds to break with the Parnellites, how are they to avoid estranging from themselves, in accordance with the threat of Mr Charles E. Lewis, the Conservative member for Londonderry, the loyalty of the whole of the greater portion of the Conservative party, to say nothing of the moderate Liberals — the armchair politicians — without detaching whom from Mr Gladstone they can have no chance of success ? The Pall Mall Gazette says : — An experiment which should be highly interesting to the public at large recently took place on the Thames at Westminster. Several persona, iucluding a lady, a clergyman and military and naval officers, all clad in the garments of their every day life, embarked in a small boat, and on arriving in midstream proceeded to jump into the water. When there they appeared to be perfectly at their ease, and making no movement, rested calmly, with their heads appearing above the surface. The explanation of the phenomenon was that the clothes worn by these persona were made of a fabric in which fine threads of cork were interwoven with other material. Mr Jackson, the inventor, is to be congratulated on the complete success of this ingenious device, which is a vast improvement ontheuawie^dly Boyton dress. Timid sea travellers can now equip themselves in garments whioh, while being udistinguishable from those of ordinary mortals, will make death by drowning an impossibility. A curious adventure happened to one of our soldiers in tne Soudan. Trooper Grubb was a man belonging to the 2nd Life Guards, and in some inscrutable fashion lost his regiment out in the desere. The regiment came back to "England, homej and beauty," but no Grubb with it, and the soldier's comrades mourned the missing man and gave him up for lost. Recently Trooper Grubb, a3 brown as a bronze penny, walked into the cavalry barracks, Windsor, startled the guard with the idea of a ghost, duly reported himself, and received an ovation, With real British pluck, Grubb, it appears, when he found out that his regiment had disappeared, quietly sat down to map out his course back to the Nile, and by dint of hard riding, hard fighting, and dare-devil gallantry made his way to the confines of civilisation.

An article appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette lately entitled " Greater Britons in the Old Country," giving the number of students from India and the Colonies at present studying at Edinburgh University, The number is 351, of whom 104 are from India, and the remaining 247 from the Colonies, Australia and South Africa being moßt fully represented. Of this 351, all except the odd one are attached to the medical schools. This, however, applies only to Edinburgh University. The article does not mention the fact that at Cambridge the Colonial contingent is almost equally strong — quite strong enough, in fact, to make itself felt as a distinct unit in University life, It ia a matter of common remark that wherever young Colonials are gathered together the Conservative element is sure to be found in great force amongst them.