News, Views and Opinions.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 19, 6 May 1908, Page 46

News, Views and Opinions.

In dismissing a charge of drunkenness against a Frenchman brought before him recently, Mr- Plowden, a London magistrate, delivered some instructive observations relative to the French and .English temperaments. A sober Frenchman, he said, full of the national vivacity, equals an intoxicated Englishman in liveliness; an Englishman, he added l , does not approach a Frenchman in vivacity unless under the influence of drink. The comparison, though doubtless intended as complimentary, to the gay dispositions of our French friends, is not very happy. Vivacious is not precisely the terra one would apply to an Englishman under the influence of drink. In that condition he is usually very quick to take oll'enec, and one would advise a Frenchman apptcached by such a person in the street to hail a cab and take the vivacity as read 1 . Taking, again, the case in which an intoxicated Englishman is not hunting for insults, but is what Mr. Plowden would doubtless call “vivacious,” it must be pointed out that his manners when in this state in no way approximate to those of the normal sober Frenchman. Sometimes he throws his hat into the air; sometimes he affectionately embraces a policeman. This kind of thing is very rarely done by the respectable and sober Frenchman. The faet is that those who have never travelled on the Continent have an entirely erroneous idea of French spirits. They seem to imagine that the streets of Paris have the appearance of a musical comedy stage during the execution of a song and dance with full chorus; they seem to believe that the normal gait of the French business man is a series of agile skips, with his hat in one hand and the tri colour on the end of a stick in the other. It is not the case. Biarritz, from whiclr the King nas just returned, and where he spends a few weeks nearly every spring, was virtually discovered- by Napoleon 111. ami his Empress, Eugenie, and it has beeh fostered by onh .or two Englishmen of eminence in-ttu-Wity because they have property there. It is a gay, windy, exhilarating town. For the there, golf is almost as important, as at St. Andrews. There used to be a cabbage garden right up against the course, and the old woman who owned it derived a fine income by charging half a franc for the recovery of every ball hit into it. The Casino is small, but none the worse for that. There used to be a withered Spanish lady, of magnificent pedigree, and almost mummified appearance, who annually drove to church to pray in a conspicuous position,' and then went to the tables, where'she’lost with consistency and sang froid. Cremation among English people does not make very rapid progress. Whereas the number of cremations carried out in Great Britain in 190 G was 732, being an increase of 138 as compared with the previous year, in 1907 the number, as shown by figures supplied to the “British Medical Journal” by Mr. Herbert T. Herring, Medical Referee of the Cremation Society of England, was 705. The number of crematories at work is stili 13. of which six at Hull. Leeds, Leicester, Sheffield, Bradford, and Ilford —are municipal. Cremation is almost wholly confined to persons of some intellectual distinction. The average citizen is still held in the fetters of custom, in which sentiment has taken root so deeply as to make it hard to eradicate. Many persons live in fear of being buried alive, and make provision in their wills that a doctor shall “rank' sikkar” by dividing a main artery of-thrusting a knife through the heart. ■?> <?> <s> How did she do it? Many ladies will envy the coolness and resource of Mrs. E. Dyer. of Lucknow, in the circumBtanees narrated below. On Thursday evening in Race Week, Mr. and Mrs. Dyer were giving a dinner and small dunce.' The verandah had been thatched in to scfvc as a dining-roorii. and the guests arriving tp dine saw-it in Hames; the strong'cast wind made the fire especially dangerous, as there were sever-

al large tents pitched near by. Everyone worked to save the house, and extinguish the fire, which was got under promptly, but not before the dinner table and all its appointments were destroyed, the silver melted, and much valuable property burned, which had been put into an adjoining verandah when the rooms were cleared for the dance. Mrs. Dyer’s dressing-room was also attacked, and most of her dresses destroyed. The damage is estimated at R 5.10,000. The fire was not allowed to interfere with the dance and dinner. While the men were fightiifg the flames, Mrs. Dyer effected a domestic reorganisation which enabled her to carry out the festivities with brilliant success. <s> <S> Anniversary celebrations have surely reached their culminating point in a jubilee that has lately been held in Boston. A woman in that city has been celebrating her “golden anniversary” as a cook. During forty years out of fifty she has been employed at one restaurant, for which she has baked no less than 394,000 pies. A local statistician has estimated that these pies, if laid out in a row, would cover seventy miles. If the New England pie is not belied by its common repute, a cook, who has imperilled so many digestions, might well deserve a place in one of Mr. Roosevelt’s lists of public enemies. Any plea for mercy that might be offeied by her friends would obviously be difficult to sustain, in view of the faet that she confesses, also, to the manufacture of 788,000 puddings and 2,000,000 doughnuts. <•> The Russian scientists who have been making a meal of a portion of a 100,000-year-old mammoth have, no doubt, established a record in ancient fare. Compared with it, indeed, the menu of that remarkable dinner given by a Brussels antiquary named Goebel was a thing of yesterday. “At that dinner,” said- one of the guests, “I ate apples that ripened more' than 1800 years ago; bread made from wheat before the children of Israelpassed through the Red Sea, and spread with butter that was made, when Elizabeth was Queen of- England; and I washed down the repast with wine that was old when Columbus was playing barefoot with the boys of Genoa.” The apples which formed part of the dessert were grown before Pompeii was overwhelmed; in fact, they were rescued from its ruins. The wine w as recovered from an old vault in the city of Corinth; and the wheat was found in a chamber in one of the Pyramids. It is interesting to know that this antiquarian fare was all excellent, the fruit particularly being described as of as fine flavour as if it had just been taken from the trees. "Lord Salvesen, in' delivering judgment in a case in the. Court of Session the other, day , called attention to the remarkable ease of a bricklayer, whose income amounted to 27/ a week. On that income he brought up six children, three of his sops qualifying for the learned professions. Notwithstanding the expense of bringing up his family, he had accumulated, a few years before his death, pearly £4OO of movable estate, besides, owning the cottage in which he lived- The life of this man, said the judge, presented a picture of untiring thrift and remarkable industry, because the evidence disclosed that he had no income beyond his weekly wage. His active life extended until he was over eighty years of age. <•> •$> * • It may 1 seem paradoxical to’ say so, but, according to Dr. Craven Moore, a Manchester expert, food is only' sound when it is rotten. At least that is one interpretation of the evidence he gave in a ptomaine case at Liverpool Assizes. There are two races of bacteria, it appears—one that sets up putrefaction’and one that does not. The non-putrefactive tribe arc the fellows who make food poisonous, and they have not any odour to speak of. All that the other sort can do is to make you feel unwell for a while, but there* is no permanently poisonous effect if you swallow a million of them.

Eating putrified food is only a matter of usage, says Dr. Moore, and he instances the case of people who eat game, when it is “high,” and the Chinese, who . only regard eggs as- a delicacy when ’ they have attained to a ripe old age When the world gets a firm grip on these valuable scientific truths it will be quite a common thing, no doubt to read such advertisements as these in the windows of the food purveyors: —'/Finest eggs; twenty years old. Guaranteed absolutely rotten.” “Try oar beef; the rankest on the market”; or “Our rich, old, musty bacon stands alone. Nothing can approach it.” ❖ ❖ Another convict has “escaped” from the prison of Thorberg, in the canton of Berne, Switzerland, bringing up the total to . ten during as many months. The convict, named Fluckiger, aged thirty years, was undergoing a long sentence for forgery when he left. None of the ten convicts has been recaptured, but one who was- unable to find employment returned to prison recently of his own accord. At a recent inquiry into the methods employed in the Thorberg prison “to reclaim the prisoners” a Gilbertian state of affairs was discovered to exist. The warders, it was found, often took the convicts for a walk to the village of Wasen, near by, where all entered the cafes, played bowls and cards, and each man .ordered his drinks, the prisoners often “treating” their warders. In this penal paradise the well-behaved prisoners were permitted now and then to visit Wiu-seh alone, in the afternoon and return to prison.at night. The Thorberg prison has become the laughing-stock of the .country. . <s><s> The story of a man’s recognising his long lost wife in a cinematograph view, and rushing upon the stage to pluck her from the screen, may .be true—but it is American. Something of the sort did happen at an exhibition of animated pictures in England). During the transit of one view there came a piercing shriek from the audience, anda woman had to be carried out fainting. The scene had brought to her the re-enactment of a tragedy. The portrait on the scene was the' portait of her child, who some time before had beer; ruthlessly snatched from her by death. ~ The picture had been taken while the child was.yet in health. It was one" of a number of portraits which the proprietor of the exhibition had bought of various photographers. Here, far from the town in which it was acquired, it was for the first time displayed, and in the audience was a woman to whom it seemed an apparition of her loved one from beyond the grave. <?> <•> <£> Interesting correspondence respecting the opium question in China was published as « White Paper recently. It deals with the proposals that have been put forward with the object of restricting the trade in opium since the issue of the Chinese Imperial decree commanding the complete eradication in ten years of the evils aiising from native and foreign opium. As regards Indian opium, on January 27th ’Sir J. Jordan telegraphed to Sir Edward Grey reporting that the Chinese Government had accepted the reduction of the total export of opium from India by 5110 chests yearly, beginning with 1908. Writing on February 12th in reference to this telegram, Sir Arthur l Godley, Under Secretary of •State for India, states that the Indian Government will be duly informed that the quantity bl opium exported beyond seas must be limited this year to G 1,900 chests, next year to 56,800 chests, and in 1910 to 51,700. The Government of India, adds Sir Arthur, will be immediately instructed to enforce the restrictive measures, without insisting on the prior fulfilment of the condition that similar restrictions would be simultaneously enforced in respect of non-Indian opium. We gather from the fashion papers that there is a tendency to revive the fashion of the night-cap for evening wear. The news is, perhaps, less interesting in itself than startling in its possible implications. Our forefathers wore night-caps for the same reason for which the miller in the riddle''wore a white hat. Carrying wigs Upon their shaven heads during the day, they were obliged to take this precaution against catching cold at night. The shaven head, in short, is the diurnal

corollary and complement of the n.ighfc cap; and if the new fashion prevails there should be a boom in the business of the barbers. , At a time of slackening trade that is an advantage not to be despised;; and the innovation may also produce the incidental benefit of bringing the bishops into line with the Canon Law, which, as was pointed out at the time of the deceased wife's sister controversy, not only orders them to Wear night-caps, but also tells them exactly what sort of nightcaps they must wear. They have not of late years, it is rumoured, been very diligent in their compliance with this particular ecclesiastical ordinance; but it is not to be doubted that they will once more obey it punctiliously no-,v that the voice of fashion echoes the prescriptions of the Fathers of the Church.