WAIFS AND STRAYS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 36, 5 September 1891, Page 340

WAIFS AND STRAYS.

What’s in a name 1 Here’s Chili always in hot water. There are sermons in stones and buttons in the contribution box.

No lawyer has any excuse for going hungry ; the statutes have lots of provisions in them. • Talk isn’t so cheap after all,’ remarked the orator when he came to settle the stenographer’s bill.’ The obsequies of the impecunious man are always of the simplest character. There are no heirs about them. The expected has happened. A woman has been almost smothered by having her folding bed close while she was asleep. The Legislature in Maine has enacted a law which requires all public school teachers to devote some time each week to teaching kindness to animals. It is noted in London that the girls are growing taller and the men shorter. The explanation is that men smoke too much and begin the practice too young. An Atchison man says he has noticed that, when a woman does not put a tomb-stone up over her husband’s grave the first year after his death, she never does it at all. She said when she reached the age of ten, • I am really too old to kiss the men And so she said until twenty, and then— And then— Site never made such an assertion again. It is a great mistake to imagine that success without effort will ever make a man or a. woman happy. What we cease to strive for ceases to be success, and gradually becomes more and more worthless. A man committed suicide the other day, and left a paper stating that he did so because his wife was a great deal too good for him. The jury thought this conclusive evidence that the deceased was in an unsound state of mind. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes believes that body and mind are both affected by the character of food consumed. ‘An exclusively pork diet gives a bristly character to the beard and hair,’ and too much food from the sea gives the shine and motions of a fish. THE CRITICAL OIRL. They met. And afterward she said She liked him very well. And yet it might be better if He were a shade more swell. ‘ I love you, dear,' he said at last; The maiden sighed, * I find I love you, too; but, oh, dear me ! Your necktie’s up behind.’ However, they were married. Christine Nilsson entertained at dinner not long ago the two divas, Patti and Albani, and the three queens of song were attired in the sumptuous simplicity of the Valois or Tudor period. They hummed a few snatches of song together, as they did long ago before titles troubled them, and were charmingly sweet to each other, but they did not appear together m public. There is a small community of people to be found living in the little Swiss Canton of Graubuenden, who have steadfastly adhered to many queer usages and customs. They do not commence to count the hours of the day from midnight to noon, but from sunset. Of course the time of day changes constantly, just as the hour of sundown varies with the seasons, and midnight to the rest of Europe may mean to these people the time when they begin their daily labour. Mrs Deborah Power, of New York, died at one hundred and one. She was famous as the * oldest banker ’in the world, and the reputed owner of £400,000. For over sixty years she was the actual head of a large manufacturing establishment, and even as late as the beginning of last month she had personally inspected business affairs demanding her attention and had signed papers submitted to her for approval. There has been no other woman whose life can be cited as a parallel. Old English.—The oldest epitaph in English, which is found in a churchyard in Oxfordshire, and dates from the year 1370, to modern readers would be unintelligible, not only from its antique typography, but from its obsolete language, the first two lines of which run as follows, and may be taken as a sample of the whole : * Man com &se how schal alle dede be : wen yow comes bad & bare: noth hav ven we aware fare: all ys weriness yt ve for care.’ The modern reading would be : * Man, come and see how shall all dead be, when you come poor and bare ; nothing have when we away fare : All is weariness that we for care.’ Protection of Animals. —The first law in the world to prevent cruelty to animals we owe to an Irish member of the British Parliament—Richard Martin. He was noted for two things—First, he was very fond of animals ; and, second, he was known to be very much inclined to fight anybody that he thought insulted him. So one day he brought in a law to protect animals. Immediately somebody made a cat call. He just stepped right out on to the floor of the House of Commons and said very gravely that he should be very much obliged for the name of the gentleman who had seen fit to insult him. There was dead silence. The gentleman didn’t give his name, and Martin walked back to bis seat amid the cheers of the House of Commons, and his law became the law of Great Britain and the first law of its kind in the world. Now humane societies have spread over the woild. Life in Honolulu.—Honolulu is very pleasant, and the beauty of the place grows upon one. After leaving one is apt to experience a sort of homesick feeling and an irresistible desire to return. Mark Twain has expressed this idea very cleverly in the following paragraph : ‘ No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but tlrat one ; no other land could so longingly and beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides ; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun ; the pulsing of its surf beat is always in my ear. I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy Italins, drowsing by the shore—its remote summits floating ike islands above the clouds ; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers perished twenty years ago.’