MISCELLANEOUS.

Inangahua Times, Volume IX, Issue 1485, 19 December 1884, Page 2

MISCELLANEOUS.

A lady has taeu taken up for child* stealing in London (says a writer in a contemporary) under very remarkable circumstances. Her husbaud seems to have had a passion for babies very unusual with the paterfamilias of ordinary life ; and as she was blessed with none of her own. whenever she found

hist fli-f-png iiffeotion needed a stimulus she stole ft baby, and represented it to him as his offspring. As infants of very tender age are more difficult to kidnap from their mothers than those who take their airings in the streets in the arms of Mary Jane or Jemima Ann, these importations into the family circle were considered (and no wonder) extraordinary fine for their age, and gave the greatest satisfaction. After six years of domestic happiuesu, however, the system has broken down, and it is only too probable that paterfamilias will be deprived of all his Itttlo ones at one fell swoop. Such wholesale bereavement, if not absolutely unparalleled, may be certainly considered as very unusual.

Mr Irish, of Sunderland, hax invented a telephone recorder or electrical reporter. A person speaking into the telephone automatically starts the ran-t-nanism, and this ends with causing a glass pen to describe the sounds remitted upon a reel or sheet of paper. At the receiving end a similar action takes place, and the person who is listening to the message can thus see it recorded at the same time.

Writing on October 17, thn London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald says : — "The event of the we«k in the literary world has been the publication of the remaining volumes of 1 Froude's Life of Carlyle.' This consists of two volumes, complete by themselves, dealing with the philoßopher's lifo in London, and this was the most interesting portion of Carlyle's life, 90 these volumes are tho most interestingportion of his biography. A vast number of prominent personages flit across the canvass, and upon nearly all of them we have some Carlylean remark. Of course it is impossible for me to do more than just meution the publication of the book, but I may say that the philosopher of Cheyne-row appears to have disliked Mr Bright, despised Mr Gladstone, respected Lord Beaconsfield, and admired Lord Wolseley. The House of Commons he irreverently described as an assemblage of • six hundred asses.'"