Winter is upon us. We have had a spell of quite cold weather during the past few days, and the outlook for the prior is very bad indeed. The strike and lock-out in the Engineering trade has assumed a a worse aspect than ever. Day after day for'a week and more we were told of hopeful prospects of settlement. Mr. Ritchie's good offices were to be accepted -by both masters and men, and in a few weeks all the idle men would have returned to work. But now all these reports prove to be groundless, The employers declare with conviction that it is hopeless to attempt to compete with foreign engineering works if they yield to the demands of the men; and the proposed conference between masters and men has been absolutely abandoned. Sir E. J. Reed has put the case of the masters very forcibly in a letter to the Times; and if his facts are correct there is. no hope of settlement unless the men abandon their present attitude entirely. Unfortunately the point is one which can hardly he settled by arbitration, the masters declare that they cannot afford to pay for eight hours' work the same wages which they have hitherto paid for nine. The men decline to work on any other terms. It is only a question of which will give way first; and at present it looks as if the whole trade of the nation would be dislocated, and misery brought to thousands of workmen who are not directly engaged in the dispute before either gives way.
London has been greatly alarmed by the very severe epidemic of typhoid fever which has broken out at Maidstone. In little. more than a week nearly fifteen hun-dre! inhabitants have been stricken down by the disease and the deaths have been very numerous, Some other outbreaks of this kind have occurred in provincial towns within recent years,—notably one at Worthing which destroyed the restation of the town as a health resort for some seasons afterwards, but there has been no such outbreak as this before, for the whole population of Maidstone is not much more than thirty thousand. Relief funds have been started and nurses have been sent into the town by the hundred, so that everything possible is being done for the sufferers.
he disease has been traced to polluted water, and there is intense indignation at what is believed to have been serious neglect on the part of the water com-nies. There is in fact talk of an action yy the corporation against the water company to recover part of the enormous cost to which the town has been put.
'A good deal of disappointment has been felt in London chess circles at Mr. Black-hume's failure to secure the first prize in the Berlin tournament, for he had been leading two or three rounds before the end. But as Blackburne was third, only a point behind the winner Charousek, and Burn was fifth, England did decidedly better on the whole than at the famous Hastings Tournament of two or three years ago. These tournaments and the Anglo-American tmatéhies which have been recently played have given an extraordinary impulse to chess. A bookseller told me a few days ago that he sells ten books on chess now where he sold one five years ago.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.