The Illustrated Usk Observer and Raglan Herald

MISELLABCEOUS NEWS. A FIRE broke out on Sunday evening at the Paris bakery, and bread and flour stores for the military at Chaillot, oppo- site the Champ de Mars. At, eight o'clock the flames were got under. It is impossible, as yet, to estimate the damage." THE BELLOT TESTIMONIAL.—The subscription entered into two years ago for the purpose of honouring the memory of the intrepid, skilful, and much beloved French officer Bellot has been closed, and amounts to upwards of £2,000, of which sum nearly E500 has been expended in erecting a monument of granite; the remainder, according to the wish of the subscribers, being in the course of division among the five young sisters of the deceased. SHOCKING OCCURRENCE.—On Thursday week, Mr. Joseph Cotterill, farmer, of Cakebridge, Prestbury-road, quarrelled at the Crown Inn, Cheltenham, with Mr. Winning, another farmer living at Leckhampton, and they fought, and after- wards renewed the fight in the yard. Mr. Cotterill, who was helplessly drunk, received such injuries that he died early the next morning. An inquest, has since been held, and adjourned, but the result has not reached us. FROST, WILLIAMS, AND JONEs,-The secretary to the committee lately formed in Oldham for obtaining the uncon- ditional pardon of Frost, Williams, and Jones, has this week received a letter from Mr. W. J. Fox, intimating that he presented the memorial lately adopted by a public meeting to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, and said what he could to inforce its prayer. Sir George promised to present it to the Queen, and to consider the application, "and Mr. Fox promised that, should any opportunity occur when Parlia- ment meets of directing the attention of other members of the government to the subject, he should not fail to take ad- vantage of them.—Manchester Guardian. ALICE GREY."—From the time of her committal to the County Goal at Stafford until Saturday this extraordinary woman has been attended by one or two female turnkeys but on that day it was considered, as well by the surgeon as the visiting justices, that she was in a fit state of mind to be left alone, and towards evening she was accordingly locked up in her cell alone. She was occasionally watched, and for some time appeared to be quite composed, and began to un- dress for bed. In a few minutes, however, a noise was heard I against her cell door. When it was opened it was found that she had fallen against it, apparently in a partial state of suffocation, produced by the smoke of straw which was burn- ing in the cell. It was then found that the prisoner had un- sewed the pillow-case, and taken out the straw, which she had set fire to by means of the gas-light in the cell. On being questioned as to her intention, she stated that she meant to place the bed upon the burning Straw, and, lying upon the bed, to burn herself to death. Whether she was partially stupefied by the smoke, and fell against the door, or whether, being alarmed at the position in which she had placed herself she endeavoured to obtain assistance by making a noise, it is difficult to determine. Upon that point a difference of opinion exists at the gaol, as well as with regard also to the woman's sanity. Happily for her she sustained no serious injury from TL.:„ », -11 CQGT JJER JJER JJFG_ MIXED ENGLISH RACE IN TURKEY.—The cnuureu of Englishmen who have married Armenian or Greek wives are very interesting specimens of humanity. They are generally pretty, and very quick and intelligent. Indeed, to English people they appear remarkably clever, from the extraordinary number of languages they can all speak. Their nurses are chiefly Greek, and they, of course talk to their nurslings in their own beautiful language daily intercourse with the natives around instructs them in Turkish; the father speaks to them in English, and the mother probably in Armenian; every visitor teaches them in French, and Italian is learned as easily; so that by the time our children at home begin s going to school, the little things are conversationally perfect in five or six different languages; and have thus already mustered a great deal of that knowledge our school children 1 toil so painfully after, and so seldom attain. Another cha- racter of this class that struck us was the wonderfully large 1 appetite they are blessed with fortunately the necessaries of < life are cheap out here, or the housekeeping bills would be II something frightful.- Chambers's Journal. f A CITY TRANSFORMED.—Since the tradition of Cadmus and the magical realities of the gold districts we know of no instance of rapid building to equal the recent transformations in Paris. In three years during which this short work has been mainly in action there have been swept away a great many narrow, crooked streets, which reeked with open streams of fetid refuse which were without side-pavements -foot passengers, horses, vehicles, and filth all mixing there in continual confusion which were seldom lighted by the sun by day, in consequence of the height and close proximity of the opposite houses, and which were but dimly lighted by night with miserable lamps, slung across the road; which were densely thronged from the cellars to the roofs by a variety of inmates whose salient characteristic was wicked squalor; into which prudent people never ven- tured after sunset, and where imprudent people were frequently robbed and sometimes qualified by the coup de I clef, or of some other sudden passport, for the Morgue; nests, in short, of disquiet, disease, and iniquity. Not only have entire neighbourhoods such as those been I swept away wholesale, but every part of the city has been more or less improved in detail. Streets of mode- rate width have had their narrow entrances enlarged sharp turns have been squared, and corner houses made to form double, instead of single angles—so that these widened cross- roads are never crowded, and seldom obstructed projecting houses have been forced back into line with the rest; con- venient thoroughfares have been opened through blind blocks of buildings which separated one quarter from another. Yet utility was not the sole motive power which has executed these improvements. The love of ornament and a passion for display, always attributed to the French, have been brilliantly and beautifully exhibited, especially in the Rue de Rivoliand the Boulevard de Sebastopol. But above these, common sense (the most uncommon sense known) proclaims itself from every improved street and altered house. An English architect, or a member of the City Improvements Committee with any conscience, or any observation, cannot walk through Paris without feeling ashamed and humiliated.—Dickens's Household Words. I "BLACK PETER."—The Duchess of Brabant, is said to I have introduced at Paris a German game called Schwarz I Peter. It is played with cards, and forfeits are paid in it, but they consist simply in the losers, every time they are unlucky, having a black mark made on their faces with a piece of charcoal. At the end of the game, as each player loses at least once, and many several times, the game turns into a kind of masquerade, and during the whole time naturally excites great merriment. DELICATE ATTENTIONS IN THE GOOD OLD TIMES. — William the Norman was a mirror of knighthood, and he is known to have knocked down the gentle Matilda of Flanders, even in the days of their courtship. The blow did not put a stop to their wooing, nor did it delay a merry wedding, which, one would think, could hardly have been merry under such auspices. Then there was that paragon of chivalry, the elder Aymon, sire of the Quatrefils Aymon of the romantic legend. That gallant gentleman was not only accustomed to maltreat his lady-wife, by thumping her into insensibility, but when his eldest son, Reinold, once ventured to comment upon one- of those pleasant little domestic scenes, to the effect that they interrupted conviviality, and that his respected sire should either chastise the speaker's mother more gently, or elsewhere, the knightly father was so enraged at this approach to interference on the part of a son, in behalf of a mother who was lying senseless at his feet, that, taking him with one hand by the hair, he beat his face with the other and mailed hand into that pulpy consistency which Professor Whewell says, distinguishes the interesting inhabitants cf the wide and desolate plane of the planet Jupiter. From this contest, however, the old knight came out as little recognisable as his son, so chivalrously had they mauled each other. So much for precedent. The example has been followed in Germany since the days of George Louis. Louis XVIII. informs us in his memoirs, that when the daughter of Louis XVI. found a refuge at Vienna, after her liberation from the Temple, she was urged by the Empress to consent to a marriage with one of the Imperial Archdukes, and that the Empress at last became so enraged by the firm and repeated refusal of Madame royal" to acquiesce in the proposal, that on one occasion her Imperial Majesty seized the royal orphan by the arm, and descended to voies de fait, in other words, visited the young and destitute Princess with a shower of hard blows. FIGHT WITH A BEAR IN NEW MEXICO. — A cor- respondent of the Ohio State Journal, writing from Santa Fe, gives the following interesting description of a desperate fight with a bear, which recently occurred in the vicinity of Santa Fe :—"I was hunting at El Vaille, thirty miles west of the Puebla of San Ildefonso, when the first thing I saw was myself within ten feet of a large brown bear. He came up to me to within about six feet, when he stopped and looked directly at me. I took aim at the butt of his ear with my rifle, and pulled the trigger. He fell at the crack of the gun, I seized my hatchet in my right hand, and my knife in my left, and made at him, when he jumped up and came at me on his hind feet, with his mouth wide open. I struck at him with such force with my hatchet that it turned me clear round, and the li-,itchet flew out of my hand. Be- fore I could recover myself he had me fairly in his hug, when I stabbed him in the side with my knife, and he let me go, and sprang away from me. He again caught me in the same way, and I stabbed him again, putting the whole blade of the knife to the hilt into his entrails. He again sprang away from me in the same way. The third time he hugged me, and, as I stabbed him again, he threw up his paw and broke my knife short off at the handle. I then turned to run, but had only made a few jumps when he caught me again, and j threw me on my face to the ground. He seized my right arm in his mouth, and shook it the same as a dog would shake a cat. He then tried to get, my head into his mouth, and at every bite his teeth would cranch across my skull! Having no chance with the powerful beast, I reached up my lame arm and succeeded in getting my fore finger into his eye with my thumb under his chin like, and done my best to gouge his eye out. He fetched one of the loudest squalls that I ever heard, and by this time-I succeeded in turning over on my back, when the rascal sat right down top of me, with his fore feet resting upon my ribs. I thought I should die sure. He must have weighed over eight hundred pounds. The blood gushed out of my mouth, and I thought my time had come. I saw the beast could not hold out long, the stabs from the knife and the ball of my rifle had nearly done the business for him. The blood was running out of his mouth, all this time, in a sluice, and I hoped every moment he would fall off of me dead. At last I succeeded in shoving him so that he careened over and fell from me, staggered about twenty steps, and fell dead. After a while I managed to get up, but I was very sick; the blood was streaming from my head and from my arm, my right eye had entirely closed up, and I laid down again on the ground, with my head on a log, about thirty minutes. I knew there was a sheep-herd about five miles off, and as I could get no help without getting there, I gathered up my gun and succeeded at last in gaining the camp in safety." ESCAPE OF A CONVICT FROM THE YORK HOUSE OF COR- F RECTION.-On Tuesday evening two convicts, named John Poland and James Williams, confined in the York House 01 Correction, endeavoured to effect their escape from prison, the former being successful. At five o'clock Mr. Raper, the governor, saw Poland and Williams in the day yard, but within half an hour afterwards Poland was missed, and Wil- liams was found in the stone yard. On being questioned, Williams said that he and Poland assisted each other in scal- ing the palisading, which is surmounted by a chevaux die frise, enclosing the day yard. Having reached the garden, Poiand and Williams had next to encounter the outer or buundaiv wall, the scaling of which was essential to their escape. By extraordinary exertions Poland, with the aid of Williams, succeeded in gaining the summit of the wall, a position, how- ever, which entirely incapacitated him from rendering any assistance to Williams, who was, therefore, (oiled in his attempt to regain his liberty. Poland dropped from the wall into the moat adjoining the bar walls, and, meeting with no further obstruction, he made good his escape, and has not since been heard of.— Yorkshire Gazette.