Foreign News Notes, Nov. 29, 1926

Bug Houses. By the last will and testament of the late Seth Buddhimal, wealthy and pious banker of Sihora, Central India, there has been left, it was announced last week, $100,000 to build and endow in perpetuity three rest houses into which insects may withdraw from the world. Poor travelers will be allowed to sleep overnight in these bug rest houses, will even be paid a small sum for doing so, as long as they lie still and kill no bugs. Should a sleeper kill a bug, even by accidentally rolling over, he will be ejected from the bug house by attendants and forfeit his sleep money. No less than 200 insect rest houses of a more or less similar nature are maintained throughout India by pious natives who realize that no bug is too insignificant to contain the reincarnated soul of an ancestor.

Bigwig House. One Captain Jefferson Cohn, rich turfman, owner of nationally famed racehorseSir Galahad III which beat the internationally famed Epinard (“Spinach”), snapped up for £75,000 ($364,950) last week the residence of the Dowager Baroness Michelham at 20 Arlington Street, an Augustan thoroughfare sacred until now to the mansions of peers (TIME, Nov. 22). Since the late Lord Michelham’s art treasures (Gainsboroughs, Raeburns, Romneys, Lawrences) are likewise to be sold, there hurried to view them last week, at historic “No. 20,” Her Majesty Victoria Eugenie, Queen of Spain, who is visiting her cousin, the King Emperor. Soon Commoner Cohn will wreck his new-bought house—once the residence of the Marquis of Salisbury—willerect on its patrician site an apartment hotel.

Air Samaritans. Pilots from the British air bases in Transjordania loaded their planes last week with dates and other comestibles which would not be injured by dropping from a height. Soaring into the zenith they flew up and down the trans-desert motor route between Beirut and Bagdad. Tourists, marooned for almost a week by floods which bogged their motor cars and washed out the railways, gazed thankfully skyward as the British air Samaritans flung man-made manna into their laps. Air Vengeance. At Bombay there was sentenced last week to “five years’ rigorous imprisonment” an Arab who would not confess his name but was proved to have shot and killed from the desert A. G. Elliott, air mechanician for famed British flying ace Sir Alan (“England-to-Australia-and-Return”) Cobham (TIME, Aug. 16).

Potent Centenarian. One Richard Ferris, potent, indomitable, waved aside his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and his toddling great-great-grand-daughter as they sought to prevent his departure from London last week to celebrate his 100th birthday by riding to hounds. Said he, “I prefer to die in the saddle!” That evening he returned alive, sipped his port.