"King of the Hoboes" Jeff Davis proposed that U. S. railroads put benches in box cars, charge a cent a mile to unemployed rovers.

Although bomb detonations have shattered some windows in his villa, 20 miles from Helsinki, bald, hulking, 74-year-old Composer Jean Julius Christian Sibelius, the Finns' "national treasure," stubbornly refused to leave. Two weeks after the Russo-Finnish war began he left his Helsinki flat for the country. Said friends: "It was the noise [of daily bombings] that drove him out. He has little fear, but the noise was just too unmusical."

Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, carrying a black knitting bag, arrived in Kansas City to speak on fashion. "I'm knitting for the Finnish soldiers," she explained.

In San Francisco, Film Comedian Ned Sparks claimed a deduction of $3,000 on his 1934-35 income of $137,380. The money went for a set of false teeth. Explained his lawyer: the teeth actually cost $3,500, but Funnyman Sparks lopped off $500 because he used them outside of working hours.

Bedizened with the insignia of a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a police captain's badge good in Santa Monica, Calif., Comedienne Gracie Fields arrived for a vacation in the U. S. after patriotically entertaining Tommies at the front. For Manhattan ship newsmen she sang this extra verse of her famous song, The Biggest Aspidistra* in the World: They're going to string old Hitler From the very highest branch Of the biggest aspidistra in the world!

For crashing a Civil Aeronautics Authority-- plane near Baltimore, Md., CAA Engineer Chris M. Lample will be tried by a colleague, may lose his commercial pilot's license.

Led by Mrs. Aline Davis Fleisher Hays, wife of Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays, seven members of the League of Women Shoppers, wearing evening wraps, jewels and orchids, emerged from a taxicab to relieve A. F. of L. pickets in front of Manhattan's Brass Rail, theatrical district restaurant. The proprietor tempted them with champagne, was spurned. Five blocks away, William Green, president of A. F. of L., crossed an A. F. of L. picket line to get into the Hotel Lincoln to check out.

Extrasensory perception Investigator Joseph Banks Rhine of Duke University asked for the record on Faith Hope Charity Harding, four and a half years old, who is credited with calling the turn on World War II, the German-Soviet Pact, the burning of the schoolhouse in her home town of Trucksville, Pa. Her latest prediction : that President Roosevelt will run again.

Arrested by immigration officers was Prince Nicholas Obolensky, chess player, art lecturer and man-about-Manhattan (third cousin of Vincent Astor's ex-brother-in-law, Prince Serge Obolensky), for overstaying his welcome in the U. S.

Addressing Oxford undergraduates on some of His Majesty's cannibal tribes, Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald said that cannibals prefer black men to white because the white ones are too salty. A cannibal once told him, said he, that human flesh tastes like good roast pork. This cannibal, however, had never eaten a white man, "only an American."

Describing in London how his ship sank after being torpedoed by a German submarine, Captain W. H. Bevan of the 12,000-ton Sultan Star said: "It was the most perfect sinking you could see--she went down like a lady."

For the third time in its long life, the British Royal Academy re-elected a resigned member--famed, bearded Portrait Painter Augustus John.* In 1938 a portrait of U. S.-born British Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot by Author-Artist Wyndham Lewis was refused a place in the Academy's annual exhibition (TIME, May 9, 1938). An "inept act," said John, promptly resigning.

To relieve the tedium of World War II, General Walther von Reichenau, an amateur boxer, had German Heavyweight Champion Walter Neusel recalled from the front to be his sparring partner in Berlin.

While month-old quadruplets Faith, Hope, Charity, and Franklin Short battened in boxes in a Jasper, Ala. hospital, Mrs. Vina Short, their proud mother, made a triumphal homecoming in Nauvoo, 16 miles away. In the mayor's car she led a parade. Townsfolk sang Home, Sweet Home. When she got there, pleased Mrs. Short found it changed--no longer the two-room cabin she shared with her husband and five other children, but a new yellow frame cottage, with furniture, rugs, curtains and electric lights--gift of the town (pop. 648) her quads had put on the map.

-- A house plant popular in the British Isles.

-- For further news of CAA, see p. 20.

-- Others: 1) first president, Portrait Painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who resigned after a row with King George III over a drawing professor's appointment; 2) Sculptor Sir Alfred Gilbert in 1909, after criticism of his Piccadilly statue, Eros.

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