WAIFS AND STRAYS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 24, 11 June 1892, Page 594

WAIFS AND STRAYS.

Give attention and you will get knowledge. A kindly feeling cannot fail to touch the heart. A good memory is that which admits a discreet forget fulness.

Statistics show that married men live longer than bachelors.

The liar despises those who believe him, and hates those who do not.

~ A million dollars won’t make a man happy, but most of us would like to try it. The word ‘Niagara ' means ‘ thunder water." The native Indian pronunciation of it is Niagara.

Beauty and ugliness disappear equally under the wrinkles of age ; one is lost in them, the other hidden. More than 100,000 000 Chinese, it is said, are engaged either directly or indirectly, in the tea industry. However high the barriers of exclusiveness may be, the rams of money will soon beat them completely down. The cynic is a blot on society, and is responsible for not a few of the wrongs which distort and pervert it. He is a potent factor in our life, but his influence is always for evil.

When we think of the tenderness, of the solicitude, of the protection, of the grace, of the charm, of the happiness, or at least of the consolation that woman brings to the life of man, one is tempted to speak to her only with uncovered head and bowed knee.

Grecian women are said to have learnt the art of improving their beauty from Helen of Tioy, who learned it from Paris, who in his turn stole it from one of Venus’s ladies’maids. Spartan women, however, were not allowed to paint. Lycurgus was too severe to allow any such soft art. But cosmetics flourished in Attica, where beauty was adored as a thing divine, and women of every rank, from the highest to the lowest slave, used every means to be beautiful at any cost. Aspasia even wrote two books on the use of cosmetics.

There is no doubt that an orange eaten early in the morning will cure dyspepsia sooner than anything else. It is a pity that people don't make a practice of eating more fruit. Apples are excellent in many cases of illness, and are far better than salts, oils, and pills. All those of sedentary habits should eat an apple daily. Of vegetables, onions, garlic, leeks, olives, and shalots all have a good effect on the digestion and blood. White onions eaten raw are said to be a remedy for persistent insomnia. Lettuce and cucumbers cool the system, and do more good to the complexion than any face wash. Bo peep.—The games of * hide and seek ’ and ‘ bo peep,’ which are great favourites with children, are to be regarded as survivals of savage habits. A very little child enjoys to the full the ‘ bo-peep’ game. It loves to hide itself behind some object, and to peer cautiously round the corner thereof with the view of detecting its mother or nurse as playfellow, and immediately conceals itself in pretended alarm when discovered. If this instinct be read aright, we are to discover in it a vestige of the same faculty which, fully developed in the savage of to-day, enables him to ‘ stalk ’ his enemy, and to shelter himself from a hostile surprise. The strong point of the argument here is the instinctive habit of the infant. As often as not it takes to ‘ bo-peep ’ naturally. It is not taught it ; and the ‘ hide-and-seek ’ game of older children seems to survive through the operation of some natural law or condition in the same way. Going to Certain Death.—Though warfare is now less a matter of personal prowess than it was in ancient times, the campaigns of the present age have produced many instances of heroic sacrifice as remarkable as any of those of antiquity. A recent occurrence of this sort is well worth relating. The story of it is told very simply in an ‘order of the day,’ issued by General Reste, commanding the French forces in the Indies. A detachment of the Ninth Regiment of the Marine Corps had been sent to subdue and capture a band of Chinese pirates which had been operating on the coast of Tonquin. The pirates took refuge in a battlemented pagoda. Here they were besieged by a party of the French, under command of Lieutenant de \ athaire. Attacking the pagoda with axes and other implements, the French succeeded in effecting a narrow breach in its walls, but this breach was sufficient to admit only one man at a time. Within, the pirates awaited the onset of the assailants. Whoever went in first was sure to meet death at their hands, but if the remainder of the French pressed in after him, the pirates might be overcome. De Vathaire did not hesitate. Putting himself at the head of a line of his men, he bade them follow him, and forced his way into the breach in the pagoda, shouting • Vive la France !' He was shot down, and died on the spot. But the attack succeeded, and the pirates were captured.

‘ As Mai> as a Hatter.’—Solomon Sanborn, of the town of Medford, in the goodly State of Massachusetts, a hatter by trade, was no doubt as ‘ mad as a hatter," when he made his will, at least. His body lie left to the late Professor Agassiz and Dr. Oliver Wendel Holmes, the genial poet, to be by them prepared in the most skilful and scientific manner known to anatomical art, and placed in the Museum of Anatomy of Harvard College. Two drumheads were to be made of his skin. I pon one was to be inscribed Alexander Pope’s ‘ Ini versa! Prayer ;' ami on the other the Declaration of Independence, and then they were to be presented to his distinguished friend and patriotic citizen, the drummer of Cohassett, a nephew of Daniel Simpson, the famed drummer of the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company. This presentation was conditional that upon the 17th of June, at sunrise, every year, Simpson should beat, or cause to be beaten, upon the drumheads, at the foot of the monument at Bunker's Hill, the spirit stirring strains of ‘ Yankee Doodle.’ Those portions of his remains which were of no use to the anatomisers were to be ‘ composted ’ into a fertiliser tor the purpose of nourishing the growth of an American elm, to be set out in some public thoroughfare, that the weary man might rest, and sportive children might gambol, beneath the shadow of the luxuriant branches.