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Variety in Brief

Grandma, who is well-known for her strict temperance views, and who would never dream of taking alcohol except medicinally, travelled up to visit us, sharing a double seat in the railway carriage with an austere elderly Bishop with whom she had a nodding acquaintance. While she endeavoured to chat affably with the old man, she was painfully conscious of the overpowering fumes of alcohol which enveloped them, and by the time the embarrassing journey ended her respect for him had completely vanished. We listened in amused agreement to her scathing comments upon the high living and over-indulgence of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries. But when she went to unpack, a shriek came from her room, and I found a tearful, distracted Granny bending over her little suitcase, which reeked like a brewery. Grandfather had thoughtfully placed a medicine-bottleful of brandy among her clothes “in case she had a bad turn”—and the cork had come out. Imagine the mess—and the fumes! But worse still—imagine what the Bishop is thinking of our Granny!

—D.C.

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The work of turning by hand the driving-wheel of George Stevenson's lathe, with which he built his first engine at Killingworth, was so strenuous that five minutes shifts were all that the operatives could manage.

Every single nut and bolt used had to be made by means of this hand driving-wheel of the lathe.

Robots were few and far between in 1821.

—“Pohutu.”

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It was recently discovered that there was still one young New Zealander not conversant with the correct pronunciation of the name applied to the fair sex of one of our most productive animals.

Walking into a country railway station a farmer found the young relieving postal assistant looking frightfully hot and bothered, clutching the telephone receiver in one hand, and calling the word “e-wees” into the mouthpiece.

“What on earth are they?” the entrant asked himself.

Evidently the man on the other end of the line was equally baffled, for after listening to a positive volley of “e-wees,” he demanded that the word be spelt. “E-W-E-S,” cried the postal official, and the mystery was solved!

—N.E.

The Otago University Museum, at Dunedin, New Zealand, possesses the rarest egg in the world, that of the enormous bird the moa, which is now extinct, but which at one time inhabited New Zealand in great numbers. The larger museums of various countries possess skeletons of the bird, but no complete egg had been discovered. From time to time bits of shells and parts of eggs were found, but no one had seen or heard of a complete egg. In parts of New Zealand dredging for gold is undertaken, and the dredges in many places leave the streams and cut into the banks. In one of these dredges which was cutting into a bank of auriferous sand and shingle, a workman, some years ago, noticed a big yellow lump which he took to be a turnip floating on the surface of the water. He found that the supposed turnip was a large egg. It had apparently been buried for ages, and the contents had entirely dried up, but experts decided that it was an egg of the moa, the only complete one in the world. The bird when full grown was about 14 feet in height, but none have been seen alive since about the middle of the seventeenth century.

—A.J.