BREVITIES.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 262, 19 February 1889, Page 3

BREVITIES.

Mr Parnell is reported to be in a critical state of health. The late Newcastle coalminers’ strike cost the Sydney Gaslight Company £lO,OOO. Major Walmsley, manager of the Auckland Stud Company, died at Adelaide last week. Sir H. Atkinson visits Napier to day, and will be entertained by the Masons this evening. The final {result of the New South Wales elections gives the Freetraders 71 Beats, and the Protectionists 66. The British Government has granted a pension of £lOO a year to the wife of the late R. A. Proctor, astronomer. Princess Louise, who is an accomplished sculptor, is busy chiselling a Jubilee statue of the Queen, for Kensington. M. Floquet, the French Premier, has re-

signed owing to the defeat of his scheme for the revision of the Constitution. The Sydney Agency and Financial Company has paid a dividend at the rate of 20 per cent per annum, and a bonus at the rate of 10 per cent.

McDermott, who shot a woman named Kennedy dead at Auckland some time ago, and then attempted suicide, has been committed for trial. The 'match between the Maori footballers and England (international) was played on Saturday, the latter winning by one goal and four tries to nil.

A boy named Stein, aged four years, was burned to death in a bush fire at Grenfell (N.S.W.). He had wandered into the bush to watch the fire burning. Higgins, the aeronaut, was so shaken by his late perilous ascent that he declares he will never go up again. His hair was turned completely gray by the strain.

A fire-was discovered in the coal bunkers of the steamer Kaikoura at Lyttelton harbor on Sunday night. The fire was extinguished without much damage being done.

A New South Wales boy hanged himself in a cow shed. He had been reading sensational accounts of the hanging of Louisa Collins, and was trying an experiment I

A blacksmith at Albury was stung on the forehead by a wasp. His face swelled up, and he soon became unconscious. Everything possible was done, but the patient died two days later.

The Star says the Prince of Wales laughed loudly and long when he heard that Lord Carrington had taken the chair at the annual meeting of the Sydney Young Men’s Christian Association.

It is stated that Mr and Mrs Kenkall are about to visit Australia, a condescension on the part of two such eminent and aristocratic artists which it is to be hoped colonists will properly appreciate,

The Pall Mall states that Dr McGregor, the Governor of British New Guinea, began life as a ploughman in Aberdeenshire, and writes that some colonial Governors might ba sent to end their career where Dr MrGregor began his.

Lord Salisbury- is very contrite about his “ black man ’’ indiscretion, and has confessed to his intimate colleagues that he fell into the blunder in an unguarded moment. It is just in unguarded moments, the unfriendly critics will say, that the real man shows himself.

In one Georgia town a single white man voted for Mr Harrison and not for Mr Cleveland. He did this not as an enemy of “ white man’s government, ” but because he was a protectionist in principle, and believed Mr Cleveland to bo a free-trader. As no black man in the town dared to vote with him, bis vote was the solitary one oast for the successful candidate in that place, So, for the scandal of breaking the political unanimity of the town, his neighbors took him and flogged him with a cowhide. A congregation which suddenly saw the preacher stop whilst he was enforcing a serious lesson, and burst out into a hearty fit of laughter, probably thought that the reverend gentleman had become demented all at once. But nothing worse had happened than a tickling of his sense of hnmor by an incident in the gallery. He there saw two boys of whom one had the reddest of red hair, whilst the other was putting his fingers into it, and then hammering them, as though he was a blacksmith at work on red-hot iron just drawn from a blazing fire,