The Intelligent Vagrant.

Bruce Herald, Volume VII, Issue 653, 27 November 1874, Page 5

The Intelligent Vagrant.

•y " Qu'bs sett an adjiciant hodienice crastina summce Tempora di Super i." — Horace. As there are people who see beauty and utility iv a Scotch thistle, so I doubt not there are those who can see something to admire in the measles. I am not one of those people, aud I have just had a liberal allowance of the measles. They are nasty things. As a mere matter of color, they cannot be for a moment compared with the artificial tinge which a devotion to malt and spirituous liquors will impart to your face, and they leave you for days " spotted like the pard," and " full of strange oaths " in consequence of itchiness in unaccustomed places. There is, however, one thing the measles do, which some might be inclined to put down to their favor. They teach you what is the finest drink in the world. You find out so soon as you have them, boiling water which has been poured on cream of Tartar, and allowed to cool, is just about the loveliest liquor you ever swilled. But, unfortunately, this is only the case while you have the measles. The beauties of the drink disappear with the disease, so it remains a question to me whether it is worth while to get the measles for the sake of the experience I have mentioned. The ' Otago Daily Times ' told the Dunedin rjeople the truth about their going to hear Madame Goddard. For being utterly " crass" in such matters as music or the drama, commend me to those respectable Dunedin audiences who cram the clearest places when it is " the thing " to attend any performance. The appreciative audience is not in_ the dearest places. Ido not desire to write a word against one of our grandest living pianists, but I woidd ask how it is that the people who, all of a sudden, rush in mobs to the best places to hear Madame Goddard, left Madame Jenny Claus to the nightly appreciation of some fifty people who liked or who understood music, and who went to the pit. The reason is, that there is about as much " taste " amongst the males and females who form " society" hr Dunedin as there would be in a similar number of domesticated hippopotami. They have not got it in them any more than they have to dress well. The Dunedin women are the worst dressed in the Colony. The horse that won the Melbourne Cup has written to me, and really makes out a fair case for public sympathy. In the first place, he says that if the handicapper made him win, ! that's his affair and no one else's. In the next place, he says^that he thinks the humiliating position in which he is now placed, by his name being rendered liable to become the : subject of swindling and bookmaking of all , kinds whenever he is entered for a race, instead of being let quietly alone, as before, is humiliating enough. But, in the third place, he asks savagely what harm he has done by ■ winning the Cup, to have his name maltreated /as it now is every moment. , Until he won

the Cup, whenever he came across his name in public print or talk (and neither happened very often) he always read it as Haricot: But now he says he hears every minute oi | Haricot (with a final.*' of dreadful prominence), and of Harricot, and of Harricott, and in fact the Lord only knows what, and he desires to protest against this. I I suppose everyone remembers Artemus | Ward's description of his interview with a newspaper man who was too drunk to remember his own name, but who went away and mentioned Artemus afterwards as having " a dissipated appearance." A literary friend of mine tells me of something which reminds me of Artemus's story. He says he has had the misfortune, by no fault of his own, to make the acquaintance of a gentleman of the press whose capacity for liquor can be paralleled aloue by that of a large cask. This gentleman, who edits the " Swamp Sweeper," a well known paper, is continually being picked up drunk out of the gutter, and is, in fact, continually meeting with those misadventures to which gentlemen of his kidney are liable. Yet, of course, no one ever gives these little affairs publicity. But my literary friend says this gentleman has conceived a mortal hatred of him, on account, he presumes, of his sobriety, and that he is continually taking every possible opportunity of alluding to him unfavorably in print. Now, my friend says this is hard, and that he does not know why he should suffer just because he is not a common drunkard. I fear I have been perhaps a little hasty in a paragraph relative to Madame Goddard that will be found above. For, after all, musical taste is as varied as any other taste, and what is pleasing to one may be the reverse of another. For instance, I had once, at the Thames Goldfield, the pleasure of being next door neighbor to a gentleman who was frequently afflicted by fits of delirium tremens, and who was accustomed in those cases to be soothed by the bagpipes. Now, with the exception of the patient and the performer, I can swear that the remedy was more distressing than the disease. And, by the way, there was not a bad thing said in a bar-room a few nights since about the Goddard mania. I find that it is the correct thing for everyone to have, at least, heard her play twice in the old country. In a bar-room the other night three or four gentlemen, as gentlemen in bar-rooms will, were outdoing each other as to the times and places in which they had heard Madame Goddard play. A gentleman of bullock punching appearance, who was by, suddenly interpolated, '• I heard her playing in Wombwell's show thirty-five years ago." The party turned on him, and with one breath pronounced his statement an untruth. To which he coolly replied, " I know its a lie ; but it aint half a bit wuss nor each o' you has been slinging for the last ten minutes."