Untitled

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 1, Issue 153, 16 September 1880, Page 4

Retaliation. —A strange freak on the part of a ewe has come to our knowledge. Her lamb had been devoured by a ravenous sow with a litter of pigs. The ewe thereupon adopted one of the little pigs, and suckled it with the utmost tenderness. —Rangitikei Advocate . ■ Nobody’s Business. One Charles Tutchen was so moved by his affection for the widow Sarah Ann Gard, that he married her on the 23rd of August. This is nothing extraordinary, as getting married is an every day affair—but it is somewhat unusual to announce the fact as Tutchen did, in the New Zealand Times, with the finish up—“No cards—nobody’s business.” Rough on Us.—Here is a sample of the mendacious statements which are being circulated concerning this colony. The San Francisco Chronicle says New Zealand owes 175,000,000 dollars, and is suffering from such wide-spread business prostration that an appeal to the charity of the world is not improbable. Thousands of her people are threatened with starvation. Affairs in Ireland are not much worse.” “ Smellington.” —Writing of the Empire City, the Rangitikei Advocate, says ; —The “ city of smells,” as Wellington has been appropriately called, had an alarming death rate for the month of August, no less than 62 persons having succumbed in that month. The people fought for about two years over the rival merits of the Clark and Olimie drainage schemes ; and whilst the wordy warfare went on from month to month, old Charon did a brisk trade. The Wellington papers are in the habit of joking about “ another lunatic from Wanganui. ” We can imagine the grim ferryman of the river Styx rubbing his hands at each victim of zymotic disease arrives from ‘ ‘ Smellington,” and exclaiming, “Another victim of bad drainage from Wellington. ” The rival drainage schemes seem to have acted like the Kilkenny cats, and utterly annihilated each other, for we never hear of either of them now, though they cost the ratepayers many hundreds of pounds.