THE WIDE WORLD: In Other Magazines.
THE HINDU IN THE COLONIES.
The photograph reproduced herewith is taken from “The Captain,” and shows a Hindu employed on a farm in British Columbia carrying on his head a load of boxes of apples over six feet in height and weighing one hundred and twenty-five pounds. The photograph incidentally gives a very good idea of the grand scenery in this flourishing colony.
A MARKET FOR OLD HATS.
The group of islands known as the Nicobars, about one hundred and fifty miles south of the Andamans, has been but little explored, though the manners and customs of the inhabitants offer very interesting peculiarities to the ethnologist. One of the most noticeable of these is the passion for old hats. Young and old, chief and subject alike, endeavour to outvie one another in the singularity of shape, no less than in the number of old hats they can acquire during their lifetime. On a fine morning at the Nicobars it is no unusual thing to see the surface of the ocean in the vicinity of the islands dotted over with canoes, in each of which the noble savage, with nothing on but the conventional slip of cloth and a tall white hat with a black band, may be watched catching fish for his daily meal. Second-hand hats are in most request, new ones being looked upon with suspicion and disfavour.—“TIT-BITS.”
EXTERMINATING BIG GAME IN BRITISH COLUMBIA.
Numbers of irresponsible men ride along the trails in spring, when the deer are in deplorable condition after a hard winter, and almost too weak to get out of the way, taking pot shots at the poor brutes with revolvers, hardly troubling to see whether they make a kill, and never following a wounded animal. Almost every district which has had a mining excitement has had the game almost entirely depleted in this manner. The more outrageous offences have certainly been stopped to some extent; but there is still a great deal of this sort of thing going on, and now that the laws are being more strictly enforced many of these irresponsible persons take out a miner’s licence so as to render themselves safe from prosecution.—“COUNTRY LIFE.”
DICKENS STORIES IN CHINA.
The Chinese are rapidly taking up Western ideas, and translations of English and French novels are now in increasing demand. Our romantic and sentimental treatment of love-affairs, however, is a thing so foreign to Oriental ethics that the hero of the ordinary European novel appears to the Chinese mind as a person of perverted moral sense and doubtful sanity. Translations of Dickens, therefore, impress the Chinese reader less than they amaze him, and detective stories and tales of adventure command a more sympathetic audience.—“WOMAN’S LIFE.”