MISCELLANEOUS.

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 384, 29 October 1874, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

A juvenile captain of a troop of juvenile soldiers visited a tin shop and obtained a tin cylinder about Sin. long, which he mounted on his head both as an ornament and a badge of office. Thus rigged, ho | returned with his company to Pine streot, and was marching up that avenue with his heart swelling with pride, and his eyes tamed on his nose, when, either by accident on his part, or insubordination on the part of some member of his command, the tin cylinder dropped down over his face, leaving but his chin below and a few hairs on top to indicate the presence of any head at all. It closed down upon him so suddenly that the poor boy forgot the dignity of his office, and immediately strove to release himself, pulling at the cylinder and prancing round in a most extraordinary manner. The shouts of the troop, partly in fear and partly in derision, brought out the neighbours, who, being mostly women, confined their efforts tor his release to going into hysterics and boxing the ears of the other boys. The cries of the captain were smothered by the cylinder into sounds of dreadful significance, and tended to increase the confusion. Finally a man attempted to pull the cylinder off, but could not budge it, and every effort he made increased the torture of the victim. As a last resort he was marched down to the tin shop, followed by the women and the command, the party gathering in numbevs as it proceeded, andforming quitca respect-^ able brigade on its arrival at the shop. Here the cylinder was opened with a pair of shears, and the commandant released, with a very sore nose and improved opinion of civil life. — Danbuiy News. There are wonderful stories afloat of the financial crises in Launceston. An elderly Hebrew gentleman who went across from Melbourne to look after his interests, desiring to see a failed firm's books, was, it is said, put in the lock-up for his presumption. It is more probablo he was only threatened. Amongst the assets of the Launceston firms are bills of Melbourne men sent across there for discount,' " because the rate was a little higher in Melbourne than in Tasmania." And on this plea they have got discounted at seven or eight per cent, what would not pass at 20 per cent, in Collins street. It is just as well to know that all the trouble which has now culminated did not originate in Launceston. They had help. The most puzzled man in England lives at Brighton. The other day he waxed at once vindictive and ingenious, and resolved to protect the sanctity of his hearth and home by an acute stratagem. In pursuance of this idea he mingled arsenic in a bottlfj of wine, and placed it where any burglar would see it, and unless practical believers in total abstinence would drink therefrom and surely die. Now, the wife of this intelligent Brightonian is an elderly woman, and when she found that bottle of wine placed in a conspicuous position, slie said that " that was just like John, He never did have any neatness, and she knew it when she married him." Then, she took the bottle and put it in the cellar with eight dozen other bottles, and arranged them neatly in rows, and contemplated her work with innocent pride. Then she told her husband about it. Since he exhausted his vocabulary of proficiency, he has been spending all his leisure in looking at those bottles, and trying to recognise the one which he' prepai'ed for the poor burglar, and unless he can solve the problem soon he expects a brain fever. The following amusing sketch isoxtracted from tha Queent-M lander: — The expectations of the young ladies who, under^ the designation of domestic servants, arrive in these colonies from Great Britain, hnve ever been sufficiently expansive. They have learnt, befoie condescending to take ship for our shore?, that at the antipodes all things go by contraries. Fifteen shillings a veek, Irish may apply, every Sunday out, follower* allowed, a horse kept for their use, and a mistress to wait upon them, are a few of the reasonable conditions which they understand to be here included among their rights. They nrrhe in high good humour, prepared to allow their employers every fair indulgence. Children in the household will not be a bar to engagements ; no objection! will be mado to polishing the master's boots with black leadon such occasions as sto\e-cleanmg may be going on. AIL reasonable attention paid to the roasting of the joint, but no responsibility incurred. Company allowed at reasonably intervals, provided they are good for vailn. Sub it is to t& feared that this pleasant understanding oannot last much longer. A young man in New Zealand who deserves to be sacrificed on the outraged altar of domesticity, has raised a flame which it will take years to extinguish. This scourge of housekeepers, impelled by Satan, passed in review the inmates of the local immigrant's home, and seeking from^h_| matron an introduction to the prettiest of its tempe^^J inmates, offered her an engagement which employers o^^H opposite sex can never compete with. His offer consist e^^B a plain gold ring, a permanency, and his young affect ic^M The thing will spread. Immigration agents mil work j^B incident up into pamphlets- It will be most effective^H I heir end of the voyage. All the comely girls will nr^H with themselves that it might just as easily have been then case. And it may. An epidemic of marryiug out of tha depot may set in now that the ice has been broken. Immi» grant maidens in high ship-fed condition, will turn up the nose of scorn at anxious housekeepers desirous of being favoured with their assistance in the humbler uunutim of domestic We. Every one of them who considers herself to have the slightest claims to personal attraction* — that is to say every one of them without exception — will prefer to wait for the regulation young man to turn up, and invite them to drive off in stale in his buggy to the nearest parson on the way to a well stocked an r l snug farm. There is every reason, to fear that the regulation young man will be there. Man is distinctly an imitative animal. There is but one consolation, and that a poor one. Immigrant! are pouring m very fast. The supply of young men may run short, and the plainer young women be left unsatisfied. Then our wives will cheerfully secure for our households a supply of patent safety gorgons. "An epidemic of murder," says the Pall Mall Gazette of August 7th, " appears to have broken out in a limited part of the south of Ireland, a district only 15 miles square. Three most atrocious crimes of the kind following ono another in quick succession within tbe narrow area referred to have alarmed the people living on the borders of Cork and Watej^j ford. The victims belonged in all cases to the peasant class — small farmers or day labourers — and were old men or helpless women residing in lonely cottages where no alarm was possible and no help within reach. What is remarkably is that no trace can be discovered in these crimes of agrarian animosity or personal feuds. The police attribute them all to greed for gain ; and suspicion has fallen on the tribe of roving tramps who have always been encouraged in Ireland by the popular tenderness for mendicancy. It is stated, moreover, that the character of this class has deteriorated by the admixture among them of men who have tried life in the United Stales, and failing through laziness or shiftlessness, have come back with an increase m both their aptitude for low cunning and their readiness to resort to violence. It may be also, that the unfortunate lenity of Irish juries towards crimes against the person has something to do with_< the recklessness of Irish criminals. A peculiarly sava»« murder, al«o for the sake of plunder, which was committed some time ago at Limerick, has up to the present time escaped unpunished. At the Limerick Assizes in the spring the jury disagreed, and, though the venue was changed to Cork, where the rase was heard again last week, it seems only too probable that there also a failure of justice will happen." A short time ago we Otago Times were shown a sample called adipocere, which is now made useful in a variety of ways. As it is probable that five persons out of ten do not know what adipocere is, it may be as well to state that it is a substance of a peculiar nature, being something intermediate between fat and wax, and is formed by the placing of animal bodies in water or moist ground. It was first discovered in the year 1756 by M. Fourcroy, at a time when a large cemetery in Paris was being removed. It was then found that the hundreds of thousands of human bodies that had been buried there had turned into adipocere, whick, whfn analysed, proved to consist of a large quantity of magaric acid, and a small quantity of oleic acid, combined with a little ammonia, potash, and lime. The adipocere to which out attention ivas colled was obtained by burying the bodies of sheep in moist ground, and it is said to be of great valu£| in wood scouring. It is also said to make splendid candles. With reference to the making of candles from adipocerc, we lately heard a good story. A smart Yankee, who did not see any opening for himself at home, started for Russia, and visited some ot the fields where the great battles between llussians and the allied troop* had taken place. He found that his surmises were correct, and that the bodies of tho slain had lurried into adipocere. lie made arrangements to purchase the right to remove the stuff, and not many months afterwards put it in the English marktt m the shape of cand es. _J An American, teaching English to a German, met hi? re-^ quest for a specimen of an English irregular verb thus :—: — I " I go, thon wentest. ho departed, we made tracks, you cub I 6ticks, they skedaddled.'' I

, In conjunction with what are called " forebodings,' l they teach ourselves to believe that intense love, or hate aa intense, maintain-^ a connection between those under its influence no matter how widely they may bo unndered. Organized bodies — perhaps we might Bay all bodies — »ro for ever giving off particle* — those at rest, in every direction ; those in motion behind them, in ono long stream These particles curry with them the characl eristics of the bodies fiom whence they part. We know it to be so in the case of flow ers, otherwise there would be no such thing as ocont, and assuredly no suoh thing as distinction of scent. And we may presume that it is so in other instances. Nor is it presumption only. That there must be something of the sort is evident from the •ucecss with which tho dog traces his uvister through a crowd oij along a well-frequented thoroughfare. It requires but & small stretch of imagination to conceive that the partides thrown off by human beings bear tho jmpress of their thoughts, feelfngs, hopes, and fuais — as they exist at the moment of separation. We may conceive, too, that there exist in us senses acute enough to distinguish, under favorable circumstance, nil the jjeculiaritits of these pai tides \> hen they are brought in contact with us. As to that contact, it is not so very unreasonable to suppose, in. these clays of electric wondera, that the fixed attention of persons may give a fired direction to such emanations, and thus originate and maintain, through all chances and changes, those delicate chains of intercommunication between friends and foes, to ■which, rather than to supernatural agency, we prefer to ascribe our startling, truthful dreams and premonitions. — Cornhill Magazine. The East Wayne Citizen says : — Mr Kyle was at a neighbour's house raising, and his wife with her youngest child, went to a spring near by to do her washing. After being engaged tome time she beard a scream from her little girl, whom ihe had left at the house, and hastened to the scene, it was her horror to behold a large rattle-snake lying there, with its fangs fastened in the child's arm. Sho succeeded in killing tho snake, and then, thinking of the child which ■he had left at the spring, hastened there, only to find that this one had climbed up to tho tub of wttor and had f&llen in and was drowned. This nearly crazed her, and she ran with all her might to where the house- raising wai, and screaming with excitement, called to her husband, who was upon the building at the time, and he through excitement in trying to get down, pulled a piece of timber upon himaelf and fell, killing him instantly. Tho friends then went back to where the child and the snake were, only to find each lying dead on tho floor. This all happened within 30 minutes. The Springfield (Ma«.) Union wisely says to young graduates : — Whatever profession a young man may ohooso, let him take heeed lest he merge his profession of a man in his profession of law, or medicine, or journalism, or w hatever it be. A man's profession should always bo incidental and subordinate to himself, never the chief thing to be said about him. There was once a cynical Frenchman who, recognizing that he had made the mistake we have warned aguinst, had engraved upon his tomb bv way of epitaph : "Born a man ; died a grocer." Don't let it be said of you that, born a man, you died a tradesman, no matter what the trade may be, liberal or mechanical' How the farmers of Wright county, lowa, drove away ths grasshoppers is revealed by the local paper. The crops in that country were abundant, and anxious husbandmen were in hopea that these destructive pests would not appear until after tho harvest. At once they came, however, in clouds that darkened the sun By a preconcerted plan, the farmers set fire to piles of dry stray on the borders of the wheat fields, and smothered tho blaze with green hay. That caused volumes of smoko to roll over tho fields. The grasshoppers didn't relish tho procedure at all. They rose with such a multitudinous hum of winga as to deepen into a roar like distant thunder, and fled tho country. In that way the Wright county farmers have a fair prospect of saving the drops A pathetic incident recently occurred at a railroad depot in Milwaukee. A young German, who by four years hard work in a brewery had saved enough money to make a home, was waiting for his bethrothed, who was to arrive from Germany. She embraced him upon her arrival, and when he tried to disengage himself her hands were firmly clasped about his neck in death. Her heart was literally broken with joy. By an Act passed last session of the Assembly (the " Justices of Peace Act, 1874,") the provisions of what is sometimes called the " larceny Act " are extended so as to apply to larceny by a bailee. This Act will rid the minor Couitsof a good deal of perplexity when dealing with ofipnees to which the trusts reposed in the offender were constantly pleaded as excluding the presumption of felony. All persons who can be charged with making away with property, hired, entrusted for delivery with goods, and the like, will be brought within the provisions of the Act, and may be dealt with in a summary way. The offences against this Act will follow the limitations of tho Larceny Act, and a retirlent magistrate or tv\o justices will have jurisdiction. A gentleman, talking to a tiundny school, afked the scholars why Simon was kept m prison. One of tho teachers quietly prompted a boy to say that it was for a hostage, and the jouth, not quite catching the words, piped out, " JIo was detained for postage." In a work by Dr James Hmton. entitled " Physiology for j Practical Use," is an essay "On the faculty of hearing," ' from which we extraot one of its excellent practical remarks \asan example: — "Tbeie are several things very commonly 'done which are extremely injurious to the ear, and ought to »o carefully avoided. . . . And first, children* ear -<tagbt never to be boxed. We have seen that the passage of the ear is closed by a thin membrane, especially adapted to »o influenced by every impulse of air, and with nothing but It he air to support it internally. What, then, can be /more likely to injure this membrane than a sudden and / forcible compression of the air in front of it ? If anyone designed to break or overstretch the membrane, be could scarcely devise amoro efficient means than to bring the hand suddenly and forcibly down upon tho passage of the ear, thus driving the air violently before it, with no possibility for its escape but by the membrane giving way. iManv children are made deaf by boxes on the ear in this way." Lamartine was asked by a friend if he did not spend too much in advertising. ' No,' was the reply, ' advertisements axe absolutely necessary. Even Divine Worship needs to bo ndvertised. Else wha f is the meaning of church bells? 1 A little boy with an inquiring thoughtful mind asked his father what was meant by full dress, as if every one should not be full dressed at all times. Tho father, who had three .grown-up daughters and a wife, who yearned after the early love of fashion, was thoughtful a moment, but replied with a heavy sigh, indicating deep feeling : • Full dress is where the wearor puts one-third of her dress on her person and drags two-thirds on the ground.'