The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-07-08 00:00:00

BRITISH AND FOREIGN.

A cooper has died in London through trichinosig.
The Milliner and Dressmaker says that the .;thness
of the fashions at present are almost beyond description.
A branch of the English Society for the Prevention
of Ctueity to Antal:4h is said to have been established in

i Spahr.
; Mr. H. Valley, of Vic ter-street, WalB%ll, reports
having found petroleum oil, of excellent quality, in the Mots
coal seam at Fenton, North Staffordshire.
1 Tile Farriers' Company (one a the ancient guilds of
I London) has deeded upon offering pr'z es for an essay on the
I veterinary treatment and practical shoeing of horses.
Severe shocks of earthquake have been experienced
at Corinth and the neighbouring villages Several houses
were destroyed, and those left standing appear likely to fall
in. The inhabitants fled for safety.
It is stated that such is the present state of the
army medical department, owing to the growing deficiency
of medical officers, that leave of absence in several of the
home districts has been peremptorily stopped.
The Canadian rifle team, 24 in number, arrived in
•Liverpool on Sionda-y from Quebec by the Allen steamer
Polynesian for the purpose of competing in the shooting
matches at Wimbledon.
The Strasburg Gazette states that the request of
Prince Louis Napoleon to be allowed to enter the Ssyss army
has been refused by the Swiss Government, and that the
Russian Government has also refused him permission to
serve in the Russian army.
A New York telegram announces the death of Mr.
Marshal Lefferts, the well-known telegraph engineer and
electrician. He had been suffering from heart unease, and
died suddenly in a railway carriage while on his way to
Philadelphia.
The total cost of in-maintenance and out-door relief
of paupers in England ani Wales in the parochial year 1875
was £7,468.t95 The cost of in-maintenance amounted to
£1,677,b98; out-relief cost £2,958,870, and the maintenance
of tamales iie asylums £859,073.
A correspondent telegraphed to The Times from
Aberdeen, on Monday :—" At a distance of 640 miles we are
for the firet time enabled to read The Times and other metro-
politan papers on the evenang of publication. This has been
accomplished by the accelerated services of the Beat Coast
C impanies. Copies of The Times have been sent to the Lord
Provost and others in celebration of the event."
A telegram has been received at the Hague from the
Governor of the Dutch East Indies confirming the news of
the wreck, at the entrance of the Straits of Sunda, of the
Dutch steamer General Kroesen, which was bound from
Atchin to Batavia. Iwo hundred and thirty persons were
drowned.
Sir Josiah Mason, it is said, is about to carry out
some new invention for the purpose of extracting nickel from
an ore which has hitherto proved so intractible to metalltu-
gists that t is held next to worthless.
At the forty-F_econd annual conference of the British
Temperance League, held at Leeds on Tuesday, it was stated
that the association had 141 auxiliaries, against 117 last year,
and was in a more prosperous condition than in any previous
year.
On Monday morning the Sheffield operative masons,
numbering 400, went out on strike, having declined the
masters' offer of arbitration regarding their demand for 2s
per week advance, or nd. per hour, making 36e per week
The total amountof revenue derived from fermented
and spirituous liquors in the year 1875-8 was £33 012 192, of
which amount £21,295,863 was from duty on spirits, and
£7,6`4,806 from duty on malt.
Christ Church, Westminster-road, London, which
has been erected at the cost of £60,000, as a perpetuation
of Surrey Chapel, was opened on Tuesday, when a sermon
was preached by the Rev. Newman Hall from the text,
"Christ is all in rill" A luncheon, presided over by Mr.
Samuel Morley, M. P., followed the service.
At an open-air meeting held on Tuesday evening at
Birmingham, and attended by several thousand persons,
resolutions were passed protesting against England being
involved in the war in the East. No consideratioe, it was
urged, would justify a Christian nation like England in up-
holding by force of arms &degrading Mohammedan despotism
such as prevails in Turkey.
Printers beat the Dutch and everybody else, but
their wives. We have ene in our office who had been a
preacher, ran a side-show to a circus, kept a singing-school,
practised medicine, had been an agent for a concert troupe
and clerk on a steamboat. He has now reformed, and
settled down to a legitimate business—that of sticking type.
We'll make a man of him yet.
The Univers publishes the following telegram received
in Paris on Sunday from Lourdes :—" The consecration of the
Basilica of Notre Dame was performed to-day in the presence
of thirty- five archbishops and bishops Monseigneur aiarmillod
delivered a most eloquent oration. More than one hundred
thousand persons received in the open air the blessing of
Cardinal Gutbert. The demonstration was most imposing.
Tee presence of several officers in uniform was remarked."
The Cunard Company are, says the Morning Post,
carrying more passengers than they have ever done; and, in
view of transatlantic postal changes at the end of the present
year, they are going to sell their older ships and construct
more vessels of a class suited to the commercial requirenients
of their Atlantic service.
"It appears," says the Constitutionnel, "that some
agents of Servia went to seek Garibaldi, without whom no
insurrection seems to be complete. They found the Cincln-
natus of Caprera making his hay. The hero expressed his
regret that his rheumatism would not permit him to fight
sgeinst Turkish despotism by the side of Prince Milano, but
he promised to send to them in Bosnia all of his former fol-
lowers that he could find unoccupied."
The solicitor to Mr. Carter, the coroner, made an
application on Tuesday to the Home Secretary for an order
to allow the exhumation of the body of the late Mr. Bravo,
and also for power to appoint a legal assessor to assist him at
the inquest. The order to exhume the body was granted,
but in reply to the other application the Home Secretary
stated that he is not aware that he has any power to either
grant or withhold permission for an assessor to sit with the
coroner. In the case of the railway accident at Abergele.
the coroner called in a legal assessor to assist him, but he
had to pay for the assessor's services out of his own
pocket.
The Lord Mayor of London presided on Tuesday at
the annual meeting of the Royal Society for the Protection
of Life froneFire. It was stated that the metropolis is now
supplied with 133 fire-escapes. During the past year eighty-
five lives were saved, and in one case nine persons were
rescued from death by means of a fire-escape. Captain
F. Walter, RN, and Captain W. S Bourchier each received
one of the sock ty's silver medals for the exertions displayed
by them in the preservation of life on the occasion of the
fire on board the training-ship Goliath.
The Panama Star and Herald states that the rinder-
pest was reported to have appeared among the cattle in Chili,
and as the Peruvians are manly supplied with beef from
Chilian pastures, fears are entered of the introduction of
diseased animals into Peru.
Sir H. Cote, at the recent meeting of the National
Training School for Cookery, advised ladies who wanted to
earn £10) a year and be their own mistresses, rscher than
governesses, to enter the school and learn cookery. One
teacher of cookery had entered a situation at £250 a year
salary, and another at £3OO.
Mr. James Campbell, Arkley-house, Barnet, writes
to The Times that a comet is now visible through a telescope
of moderate power. It was so near Jupiter on the night of
the let July as to appear between the planet and his third
satellite.

On Sstorday a passenger by one of the North-
Western express trains jumped out at Blotchley Junction.
The train was then &Aug at a speed of forty miles an hour,
He was removed to the Bedford Infirmary, but died on
Monday in an unconscious state.
In London 2,387 births and 1,175 deaths were regis-
tered last week, the former having exceeded the average
numbers by 113. while the latter were 192 below. The
deaths included 3 from small-pox, 30 from measles, 26 from
scarlet fever, 7 from diphtheria, 28 from whooping-cough, 17
from different forms of fever, and 49 from diarrice ; thus
to the seven principal diseases of the zimotic class 160
deaths were referred, against ICO and 366 in the two pre.
ceding weeks
The first public park possessed by the borough of
Rotherham was opened on Tuesday with civic display and
ceremory. It is eleven acres in extent, is leased from Lord
Effingham for a nominal sum, including the castle, whiob
was built by the former Earl of Effingham as a prmest
against the then Government resisting the American Decla-
ration of Independence.
At Amiens, a gymnastic professor, after several
experiments with a fire escape, was precipitated to the
pavement by a window bar giving way and dangerously
injured.
At a meeting of the committee of the Notts Non-
conformist Association, which represents upwards of 50
congregations of the town and county of Nottingham, held on
Saturday, a resolution was unanimously adopted to the effect
that, in the judgment of the committee, the Education Biil
now before Parliament is defective and reactionary.
For some time past great dcpre,sion has been expe-
rienced in the cotton trade of Blackburn and loca'ity, and
repeated efforts have been made among the manufacturers
to induce them to adopt abort time. 01 Tuesday afternoon
Councillor Bury posted a notice in his mills, containing 1,500
looms, intimating that, in coeseqin nee of depression in
trade, the mills .111 he closed on Saturday and Monday in
each week until farther notice.
Referring to tbe frequent disasters from premature
explosions of blasts in quarries, Mr. Evans, one of the In-
spectors of Mines, says—" These accidents form a heavy
percentage of each year's total. There is a lemedy both
simple and inexpentive. It is only to put the charges of
powder into paper bags"
As the utom of decorating the interior of churches
is bccoming more Common, we would sugeest, at least in the
country, for each church to grow its own flowers, and thus
accomplish two ends—decorating both the church atd the
churchyard. In many country and suburban churchyards
there is plenty of room in which even the choicest flue ere
mignt be grown in quantity.-59t Journal.
'Me Ironmasters' Associagom in Leeds and district
have lamed a circular to the large employers of labour in
the iron and tool trades, representing the necessfty of a.
return to the old ten hours' system of work unoer the present
circumstances. The men will sut)mit to the additional hour,
considering it is far better now to suffer some sacrifice than
to drive away all trade, a result which the masters are con-
fident would follow if tie nine hours' system is continued.
A meeting of the Metropolitan Asylums' Board was
held on Saturday, at which it was stated, in a report from
the Stockwal Hospital Committee, that of fifty small-pox
patients received during the past fortnight, f, ur had died,
and twenty-four had been dischargea, leaving seventy in the
hospitaL The chairman of the committee remarked that he
had not had so serious a report to make since 1871.
An accident of an alarming character took plane at
a late hour on Saturday night on the Metropolitan Railway
in the tunnel between the Farringdon and Kirg's-cross
stations, art Addison-road train running into a District line
train which had come to a stendstill in consequence of the
bursting of a steam-valve. Several persons are stated to
have been more or lets seriously hurt.
On Monday night another fatal boat accident hap-
yened on tie Thames. Mrs Stent, of Kingston, was at
Thames Ditton with a friend, and wonted to ferry over to
the other side to her home Two soldiers, stationed at
Hampton Court, who were in a boat, offered to take the
women over, and with them was a girl carrying Mrs. Stent's
baby. When rowing round the end of the island near the
"Swan" Hotel the boat upset, and its occupants thrown
Into deep water. Mrs. Strut and her baby were drowned,
hut the others were Paved by persons who hurried to the spot
on hearing the cries for help.
The excitement which is usually observable amongst
the merchants and brokers of Mincing-lane before the new
teas coming to hand, displayed itself again last Saturday
morning, when tae information reecied London that the
first of this season's teas had arrived in the West India Docks,
Messrs. M'Gregor, Gow, and Co for the third time winning
the me with their steamship Giencst tney, Captain Gulland,
The speed of this vessel has at times been unnenaliy great,
andlshe has made the passage from Woosung in 41 days.
The pupils ,sf the late Rev. Henry Ayling have esta-
blished, in respect to his memory, a prize to be csl'ed the
Aylieg Prze, and to be oistrihuted in a handsome present of
hooks to the scholar an the Grammar School at Guildford,
who shall, previously to the inictsumm r vacation in eaoh
year, compose the best exercise in Latin verse. The subject
for the present year is Trie Capture of Constantinople ria
the Turks, 543." The prize is invented in the names ,it ihree
trustees who will have the power of devoting its proceeds to
a memorial windo a in the parish chirch if the school should
s fail in supplying competitors for the prize.
"According to accounts from Belgrade, Prince
Milan, before leaving, went to attend Mars the Metro-
politan Church, and was blessed by the Metropolitan. He
was accompanied by the Princess, who, in spite of her
delicate health, bore the parting heroically ' • only when
taking leave she beret into tears and seemed to lose courage.
The Prince, too, seemed very much affected, and well he
might be, for it was probably the most decisive moment of
his life. The Russian and German representatives were
present to take leave of the Prince."—Tienna Correspondent
of The Times.