WAIFS AND STRAYS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 30, 25 July 1891, Page 201

WAIFS AND STRAYS.

In one respect the ladies have a parallel. The spring chicken never tells its age.

The practice of smoking cigarettes by women is on the increase in both London and Paris.

Don t try to make a pet of a bumble-bee because he is pretty. Beauty is sometimes deceitful.

Tommy: ‘Paw, what is “fame?”’ Mr Figg: ‘Fame, my son, is something a man makes money out of after he is dead.

There are plenty of people on earth who will be very indignant when they reach the other world to find there are no reserved seats.

The London Litneet says the best authorities estimate that the average duration of human life has increased ten years in the last century.

He who. when he hath the power, doeth no good, when he loses the means will suffer distress. There is not a more unfortunate wretch than the oppressor, for in the day of adversity nobody is his friend.

THE FALL OF MAX. I. n J a J* n °t be.' the sleek banana said. The Fruit Forbid that brought in sorrow’s ban. i et I confess that 1 have done mv share Toward assisting in the fall of man.’

In the hands of a woman the uses of a hairpin are manifold. With it she does everything, from buttoning her shoe

to scratching her head, and by twisting it around the key of the door site renders her bedroom burglar-proof.

In Corea every unmarried man is considered a boy, though he should live to be one hundred. No matter what his age he follows in position the youngest of the married men, despite the fact, perhaps, of having lived years enough to be their father.

THE FALL OF THE THERMOMEI EK.

Twas in a breach of promise suit the letters all were read. And here is what the opening words of each epistle said : •Dear Mr Smith.’ ‘Dear Friend.’ ‘Dear John.’ ‘My Darling Four-leaf Clover.’ ‘My Ownest Jack,’ ‘Dear John.’ ‘Dear Sir.' then ‘Sir’—and all was over.

Many a child has been warped and soured for life by the want of the sunshine of praise and approval. ‘ Teach what ought to be done,’ said an eloquent preacher, ‘ and not what ought not to be done; let th® good crowd out the evil.’ Kindness will melt, and reproof harden—this is an immutable law, and yet it is one of the hardest lessons that a conscientious parent or teacher can learn.

Deeper and Deeper Still.—ln London recently a magistrate was shocked because a lady, who was accompanied by her husband and a male friend, was not permitted to smoke a cigarette in the cafe of an hotel. The gentleman friend was so much annoyed at the prohibition that he threw a water-bottle at the waiter’s head, but, missing his mark, broke a panel worth £5. The magistrate refused to tine the defendant more than Is, so strongly did he feel about the lady’s treatment. His theory is that ladies ought to be allowed to smoke wherever they please.

The Ways oi’ Dahomey.—A peculiar privilege granted to the female warriors of Dahomey is the right each to claim one female captive of a conquered tribe. The male captives all belong to the King, and since the slave trade on that coast has been practically abolished, they are looked upon as almost useless, except for sacrifice. It is, indeed, chiefly to get rid of prisoners that the wholesale slaughters are kept up, and ten victims perish in the coins 3 of a year in Dahomey in this period for one that was killed in the early part of the century, when every man and woman could be sold for value tc slavers from America.

When They Meet hie Right One.-—Every man has a natural regard for the fair sex. In the language of the poet :

The bee thro’ many a garden roves. And hums his lay of courtship o’er; But when he finds the flower he loves, He settles there and hums no more.

The whole campaign of love that besieges the citadel of the heart is: A language of the eye. a cadence of the voice, harmonious and tender, the enlisting of sympathies, transforming and ripening sincere regards as to love, infusing hope, elevation ami comfort, that aptly suggest sunshine and a ‘ helpmeet.’ When a girl meets the right one she knows it.

Education in South America.—Theodore Child says : ‘ The young Argentines are as ignorant and badly-informed as they are badly behaved, and that, too, not from want of intelligence—they are even precociously intelligent—but from lack of severe ami logical training. One cannot believe that the extreme licence allowed to boys of ten and twelve years of age, such as liberty to smoke and to contract premature habits of vice and immorality, is compatible with good intellectual training. A more corrupt, rude, unlicked and irrepressible creature than the average Argentine boy it would be difficult to find in any other civilised country. The gills, too, have an air of effrontery ami a liberty of language to which the older civilisations of the world have not accustomed us.’ It is teported that in the last five years twenty seven American gills have married Chinamen, and in only five cases have they lived with their yellow husbands beyond a few months.

A lady who has kept notes states that in the last two years there have been in the daily pa|>ersof America accounts of more than three thousand murders of wives by drunken husbands.