THE FASTEST TRAIN IN THE WORLD.--The fastest train in the world is without doubt the "Flying Dutchman," which for many years has succeeded in knocking off the seventy-eight miles between London and Swindon in an hour and twenty-seven minutes. This is at the rate of fifty-three miles an hour. Exeter is 194 miles from Paddington, and is reached in four and a quarter hours, or an average pace throughout, including stoppages, of forty-five miles and a half per hour. The Prince of Wales has made some remarkably quick journeys on the Great Western. Not very long ago the North Western took him from Manchester to London in three hours and fifty-five minutes, but the Great Western had previously beaten this by conveying him from London to Swansea (216 miles) in three hours and fifty-three minutes, the average speed throughout that remarkable journey being almost fifty-six miles an hour. English trains are much quicker than those of the Continent. The speed of the American expresses is from thirty-five to forty miles an hour. The Chemin de fer du Nord runs its expresses at an average of thirty-seven, and the Paris and Mediterranean at thirty-four miles an hour. Some of the German expresses cover thirty-six miles an hour. A TERRIBLE SITUATION.--Mr. Ballou, in his recent wanderings under the Southern Cross, has found one more unpleasant item for reptile literature. In Sydney he heard the following snake story, the facts of which occurred not long before, near the town of Parramatta. In the family of a settler, who resided some half a league from the town, there was an invalid daughter, she being of an extremely nervous temperament. She was sleeping, one summer afternoon, in a hammock swung between two supporting standards in the shade of the piazza, when she was suddenly awakened by feeling something cold and moist clinging about her throat. She put her hand to the spot, and clasped the body of a snake just at the back of its head, and, with a horrified cry, wrenched with all her strength to pull it away. This was the first instinctive action of the moment, but so great was her terror that she speedily lost all consciousness of the situation. Her hand, however, still grasped the snake where she had first seized upon it, and with such a convulsive force that the creature was rendered powerless. The cry of the terrified girl brought the father from within the house, who instantly came to her relief; but in the fit which her fright had induced, her hand slowly contracted about the creature's throat with a force which she could not possibly have exerted when awake, and before her fingers were unclasped, by the aid of a bit of hammock cord, the reptile was completely strangled. Fortunately, the creature had not bitten the girl before she seized it, and after that it was unable to do so. It is said to have been four feet long, and of a poisonous species. [Illustration: "I GAVE MYSELF UP TO READING THE BIBLE." (_See page 194._)]