General Notes.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 273, 26 July 1878, Page 16

General Notes.

Quite a little ripple of excitement has been caused in high social circles by the report that Miss Henrietta Dana, the youngest daughter of Hon. Kichard H. Dana, jr., and granddaughter of Bichard H. Dana, the poet, has been converted to Roman Catholicism. —Hartford Times. Pope Leo XIII. recently received in private audience a committee of American ladies headed by the authoress, Mrs. Turner, and with her, as spokeswoman his Holiness conversed very benevolently of the United States. It has been decreed by the German Emperor that no picture commemorating any scene in the late war shall figure in the German collection of fine arts intended for the exhibition at Paris. Emulating this spirit, the French have ordered a similar course as regards French pictures. The following obituary notice, which we (Bovihay Gazette) cut from the Standard, is surely the unkindest cut even given to a dear departed. Was it put in by Captain Jones's exasperated widow 1 — Jones. — April 5, drowded off Hasler Beach, Captain Grey Jones, R.N., in his 40th year, whilst under the delusion that he was saving life. The Catholic Church at Carrol, lowa, was demolished by a tornado recently. The World protests against the new way ladies have- of recognising a gentleman by giving a pert nod with the head, instead of a slight bow with the head and shoulders. Because the Princess _of Wales chooses to recognise in this manner some favoured persons with whom she is on terms of intimacy, and whom she may haye met once or twice before in the day, that is no reason why ladies in the Row should abandon what is graceful and ladylike for what is mannish and inelegant. The Pius memorial Church, Baltimore, the corner-stone of which was laid on Sunday, May sth, was projected by Archbishop Spald'ng, a short time previous to death, to commemorate the Jubilee or twentyfifth year of the Pontificate of His Holiness, Pius IX. The Cape colonies want telegraphic communication with England, and hitherto the only chance offered to them was by a submarine cable, to be laid at a cost of a million and a half sterling from Natal by Mauritius and Zanzibar to Aden. Sir Bartle Frere and the chief of the Telegraph Department, propose a line from Pretoria, the capital of our new province the Transvaal, to Tete on the Zambesi, thence to Zanzibar, and thence to Gondokoro in Soudan, to which point the Egyptian land lines are now being extended. The length would be 2,500 miles, in three nearly equal sections of about 800 miles each, and the cost would be just half a million sterling, one-third of the submarine cable. A plot by the Shah of Persia's soldiers was discovered just before he left for Europe. The men's pay was in arrear and they naturally thought they should get some of it before the Shah left for a long journey. The Shah cut the knot of the difficulty by executing twenty of the soldiers, pour encaurager les avtres !