MISCELLANEOUS.

Inangahua Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1223, 22 January 1883, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

Eome has been celebrating her 2,635 th birthday, on which occasion the new excavations at the Pantheon and Forum were thrown open to the public. At the building of a Siamese temple the King, who laid the foundation stone, made a very impressive speech, it was very brief, especially the last sentence. " The name of this temple shall be — "Pratommahorommarachanusawari."' Lawn-tennis not being found sufficiently exciting for the French ladies, they are learning fencing. At Deauvillet there is a fencing room, where numerous ladies, wearing the prettiest and most coquettish costumes, already display a certain proficiency with the foils. ' I dont' miss my church as much as you suppose,' said a lady to her minister, who had called upon her during her illness,' ' for I make Betsy sit at the window as soon as the bells begin to chime and tell me who are going to church and whether they have got on anything new.' An international conference, with a view to promote arbitration as a substitute for war, is to beheld on the 17th, 18th, and 19th of October next, in the Palais de la Bourse, Brussels. The conference is convened by the International Arbitra ion and Peace Association of G.eat Britain and Ireland. ,

' Some curious personal statistics show that the oldest earl in the United Kingdom, the Earl of Mouutcashel, aged 89, who is the oldest peer in existence, is an Irishman; the oldest marquis, the Marqujs of Donegal, aged 84 years, is an Irishman ; the oldest judge, Baron Fitz- ' gerald, close on 75, is an Irishman ; and ■ the oldest Protestant Bishop, the i Bishop of Kelmore, aged 81, is an ; Irishman ; thus showing that in the , Green Isle it is possible to attain to ripe \, old age. Miss Lila Clay's experiment at the . Op3i*a Comique with a minstrel company of ladies only is tolerably suct cessful. The company consists of 70 pretty girls, who, when the curtain . rises, are seen sitting on the stage in t rows. The first row are dressed in red, the second in yellow, the third i in blue, and so on up to the last rows, which shade away into lilac and primrose. The young ladies' dresses, however, are of the briefest, and even when they stand do not descend below the knee. Some years ago, when the late v Judge M was holding court in one of the interior counties of Maine, a case was called which had long been in litigation. The costs considerably I exceeded the amount at issue, and { the Judge, thinking it unreasonable to keep the suit longer in court, advised the parties to refer the matter, whereupon they assented, and agreed to refer the case to three honest men. The Judge said the case involved some legal points which would require one of the referees, at least, to have a knowledge of law ; therefore he would suggest the propriety of then* selecting one lawyer and two honest men. Writing of a ball at Cowes, a lady says in a private letter : — The Prince and Princess of Wales came early (about eleven) and stayed late — that is to say, the Prince did, letting his wife go home alone (not an usual thing with His Royal Highness). It is curious how fond he still is of dancing. He never by any possible chance misses a valse, that being his favorite dance; for which reason does it always predominate on London ball programmes in the ratio of at least three to one of all the other dances combined. With all the practice he has had — for he has been out since he was seventeen — it is stravige that he should be a bad dancer. Yet he is. And a little short ho ppityskippity step he has that sends him spinning round like a badly-balanced teetotum with a velocity that would make one's head swim merely to look at. He likewise gets very hot and out of breath, and his collars grow limp very early in the evening. As to his " steering " powers, it is quite impossible to judge, for when he dances everybody gets carefully out of his way, and lets him have the floor to himself. One mustn't jostle royalty, you know, even in a dance. The Pall Mall says regarding the borrowing proclivities of the Australasian Colonies : — "Debt-contracting is, in fact, the most striking thing in connection with these Colonies. They have contrived in these five years to add £36,000,000 to their public obligations, New Zealand in this respect being the most distinguished member of the group. Its ' debt has risen £11,000,000 but population considered, its * progess' is outstripped by Queenland, which with but 227,000 souls against New Zealand's half million has augmented its debt by £6,297,000, while South Australia does at least as well with an increase of £7,360,000 for a population of 263,000. The aggregate increase in the debts of all the Colonies is equal to 60 per cent, on .the total of 1876. and at the end of last year these Colonies owed in all £96,000,000, exclusive of their local and private borrowing from banks and land com- . panies for harbours and public buildings, &c. In the current year the borrowings will have brought the tota[ up to quite £100,000,000, or about ' £35 per head." "It is now being complained in America," says Land, " that absentee landlordism is becoming rife iu that favoured Eepublic. Most of the large American landowners are said to be absentees. In New York, in Washington, in San Francisco, in Boston, ' in Chicago, in St Louis, say the com- ( plainants, live men who own immense 1 tracts of land which they seldom or ] never see. One man is said to own ( 400 farms in the various States, • one of which extends to 35,000 acres. The large scale upon which American agriculture is conducted is to be thanked for this state of things, one . of the results of which is that a large ' proportion of the profits goes to 1 capitalists in the great cities of the i Union. There are many trading cor- 1 porations which own wide stretches s of land ; one of these, indeed, the s Standard Oil Company, probably own more land in the Western States than the London companies among them own of land in Ireland." i The book which has fetched the largest price on record is the „ Vaklar-

fer Boccaccio," that was sold in the Boxburghe sale. After a battle between Lord Blandford and Lord Spencer the former won the prize at the cost of £2280 ; and by so doing he raised hinself to a pinnacle, as yet unattained by others. Recently in London that price was nearly approached. The " Petrarchs " of the Runderland library came on for sale-, and a struggle took place betwen Messrs Quaritch, Ellis, and Mibaudeau. Book-buyers expected some excitement ; but it wa& thought that the great price would be given for the edito princeps, printed by V. de Spira in 1740 on vellum. This fell to Mr Ellis at £280. But when the " Tetrarch of Bernardino di Novara" (1488) came to be sold, that price was instantly outdone, The book is rare and beautiful ; its great attraction lies in the illustrations, which resemble those of the celebrated j Poliphilo. After much frantic bidding it fell to Mr Quaritch fer the enormous sum of' £1950 — the second lagest price ever paid for a book printed on paper. A paragraph in a recent issue of -a London journal says : — "Out Wednesday afternoon one of the most astounding sales of colliery property ever known took place at Bamsley, when colleries situate at Dodworth and Higham, belonging to the Dodworth and Silkstone and Iron Company (liniietd), were sold by auction at the King's Head Hotel, to Mr Robert Whitmore, of Manchester, for £2,000, having been floated in 1873 with £300,000 nominal capital. The sale took place by order of the Court of Chancery. There being no reserve bid they were knocked down for that sum, to the astonishment of everybody present. At one time they employed 2,000 hands. It was stated by the auctioneer that there were 1,824 acres of coal, and in addition the purchaser would have the benefit of £11,000 money overpaid for coal rents. There were thirty-two engines, of 1,068 horse-power ; twenty -five boilers, giving 1,000 horse-power; 134 coke-ovens, fifty miles of tramways and slidinga, and one of the finest colliery plants in Yorkshire.