The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1913-02-07
OUR FOREIGN LETTER

London Feb. 7.-The quality of the
 mud in Singapore harbor has been set tied after AZ days litigation which is estimated to have cost $35 per mini | ute. The suit, which breaks all rec ords for the Chancery Courts here, was brought by John Ards & Sons, the famous contractors and engineers, against the Dock Board of Singapore,
 and concerned a five million dollar
 contract for the construction of a The Ards claimed $2,5OO,o0O dam | ages for misrepresentation as to the sort of mud they would have to build I their dock on, and the Dock Board claimed similar sum for breach of 1 contract. During the AZ days hear ing Justice Parker, five Kings Coun- sel and an army of less important at 1 torneys had to wade through docu-
 ments weighing half a ton, and after a four days speech, followed by the
 evidence of 24 experts, Kings Coun- seI William H. Upohn, for the Ards. succeeded in establishing that ! the Singapore mud was 'tslithery, oily, wa tery and like no other mud in the world" and in fact not by any means the sort of mud a dock board should ask respectable firm of contractors to build a dock on.
 Justice Parker held that there had been a bIunder through carelessn ess but no intention to deceive. He re- served judgment on other points, but both parties, evidently satisfied that they could not get much out of these points. didn't wait for the decision but came to an agreement. The exact amount of the legal costs is not yet known but as most of the witnesses and evidence had to be brought to London from the Straits Sett1emen the cost must have been enormous. Up john, leading counsel for the Ards.
 E,,c freshers' of $500 a day. while his chief opponent did almost as well.
 Paris, Feb. Under a law dating back in 1779 the owner of vineyard at Capestang, near Boziers has been fined $5 and heavy costs for picking grapes on her own vines. She was pIucking- the fruit which had been 1e1T on the vines after the fall gathering when the local po1iceman.told her that she was committing an offense against the law, all grapes left on the vines after the harvest were the property of the poor. She was fined and ran up , heavy bill of costs appealing. but the court at Boziers has just handed down decision upholding the fine.
 Berlin, Feb. 7.-'More than tenth of all compositions attributed to Bach and sold as Bach's to-day, are forger- fes.'' So declares John Schreyer, the noted music historian of Dresden in His new work on Each Criticisms.
 Schreyer has made a thorough study , of the famous composers works and bases his statement upon technical er- TOTS which he found in many compost , tions attributed to Bach.
 St. Petersburg, Feb. 7-Reformers are looking forward with much inter est to the prospective municipal housecleaning in the Russian capital. Probably no other city of Europe has such a deplorable record of malad- ministration, especially in the matter of hygiene. The frequent recurrence of various kinds of epidemics is att tributed almost solely to the lack of enforcement of preventive measures. At the same time bribery and general corruption of municipal officials have flourished practically without check.
 It was due to energetic public ex- posture of these conditions that in the recent city election the Liberals won two-thirds of the seats in the coun- ell. The old administration retained only 15 out of s1.