WAIFS AND STRAYS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue VII, 18 August 1894, Page 152

WAIFS AND STRAYS.

Against stupidity the gods themselves are powerless.— Schiller

Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but hard enough to take. He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.

Youth no less becomes The light and careless livery that it wears. Than settled age his sables and his weeds. Importing health and graveness. SHAKESPEARE. Kindness shows out the better part of every nature—dis arming resistance, dissipating angry passions, and melting the hardest heart.—Samuel Smiles

Write your name in kindness, love, and mercy on the hearts of thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten.—Chalmers. The tendency to persevere, to persist in spite of hindrances, discouragements, and impossibilities—it is this that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.—Carlyle.

All censure of others is oblique praise of self. It is uttered in order to show how much the speaker can bear. It has all the insidiousness of self-praise and all the reproach of falsehood.—Addison.

A Society op Beggars —Several prominent Parisians were recently pestered by begging-letter writers, some of whom had the audacity to threaten reprisals by dynamite if they did not receive prompt alms. This conduct has led to the arrest of twenty-two men, who formed a band of cosmopolitan begging-letter scribes. They usually met in a tavern in the Rue de la R iquette, where they had a veritable exchange and mart of concocted eleemosynary epistles, forged certificates of conduct, sham passports, and lists of the persons who were to be approached or written to for pecuniary help The tavern was surrounded by the police, and it is believed that every member of this International Mendicants’ Association has been captured. Russians predominated, Austrians and Garmans coming next ; Hungarians, Greeks, and one alleged Turk, who, in the police reports, has a Teutonic name, bringing up the rear. Imperishable Eggs —I hear with some dismay of an invention which has been tried at Dublin for the preservation of eggs. The eggs are covered with a certain preparation, and will then keep for months. This is a serious matter. Should the invention be generally adopted there will be no such thing as stale eggs, and in consequence the elder humour would lose one of its most faithful and hardworked subjects. The range of the elder humour was never very wide, and I have reason to know that this loss would be severely felt. The consequence weuld undoubtedly be that much humour which now takes its exercise on the subject of bad eggs would have to be diverted to something else—that is, either to G irman bands or to intoxication. From both of these latter the utmost possible harvest of jokes is already reaped daily, aui it is impossible to forecast what the result would be if any further demands were made on them. Perhaps the Government will interfere.

Use of the Camera —Now that it is possible to take instantaneous pictures, the u«e of the camera has extended in every way. In England afe v weeks ago a certain iron bridge of one of the railways was suspected of being unsafe. It looked all right, but there were soms reasons why the managers were afraid of it They could not decide themselves, and they sent up to London for a famous engineer to come and look it over. He came, and was puzzled too, until he thought of a way to test it. He took a kodak and made a picture of the bridge with no train upon it. Then he kept his camera in position and waited for a fast train to come. Pretty soon an express train came thundering on, and just as the big locomotive struck the bridge he pulled open the slide and took a second picture on the same plate that still held the first. When the plate was examined the picture with the train was found so much below the other as to show what the engineer and managers had feared—a dangerous droop to the bridge.

Fancies of Mad Folks.—At a lunatic asylum I recently visited 1 saw a woman about 50 years of age who was under the belief that there were no men in the world. Just to test her the party of visitors among whom I was asked her how many men there were in the room at that moment. ‘ None,’she replied. * They are all females.’ In the same asylum there is incarcerated an elderly lady known to the other inmates as ‘ S lent Jane. ’ Some months ago she com mitted an offence against a rule of the establishment, and was severely reprimanded in consequence by the master. She thereupon gave expression to a resolve never to speak again, and up to the present time she has faithfully kept her promise, although persistent efforts are made to get her to talk. The only noise made by the old woman is a sort of humming, and, despite the strongest temptations that have been held out to her, she never utters a word. I once meta lunatic whose special mania was the making of beds. He was so fond of making beds that he voluntarily made the whole of the beds in one dormitory. He performed the task with marvellous regularity and speed. He could make a bed perfectly in less than two minutes, and such carefully made beds were never seen before.

Implanting New Teeth.—The last and most ingenious resort of the dental surgeon is ‘implantation,’ i e , the setting of new teeth into the jaw. For this purpose real teeth are employed, and not artificial ones. Cocaine having been first applied for producing local ameithesia, a hole is drilled in the j twbone, and into this socket a good tooth newly drawn from somebody’s jiw is set. If the patient is young and vigorous the osseous structure soon closes around it, and by the time the gum is healed the tooth is ready for nse. It should last from three to ten years. In thecas; of au elderly or feeble person, it may be fastened in place by silver wires passing around the jawbone. The root of a freshly-extraded tooth is covered with a delicate membrane called the ‘ pericementum,’ the vitality of which materially assists the wished.for combining of the tissues Unless the grinder is directly transferred, the vitality of this membrane must be aitificially preserved. One way of doing it is to graft the tooth temporarily into the comb of a cock, that part of the fowl being well fed with blood, as may be seen from its redness. When wanted for use it is cut out.