TOPICS OF THE DAY.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13333, 27 January 1909, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE DAY.

When an actor of imActing portance is disabled at Under the eleventh hour, and Difficulties, there is no understudy, there is only one thing to bo done. The part must be read, and the indulgence of ( th_ audienc— asked for. During the run of "The Second Mrs Tanqueray" in London, Mrs Patrick Campbell suddenly forgot her part entirely, and had to go through a scene with a play-book in her hand. She was told afterwards that she had played the scene exceptionally well. An even more awkward contretemps occurred; in the case of a company in which Irving wait playing in his days of obscurity. A young lady who was playing the part of a blind girl said she was too ill to go on, so the stage manager .suggested that someone should read the part. Irving, in his quiet way, said, the idea of a blind girl reeding from a book was a distinct novelty. But more awkward than either of those two situations was the predicament in which Mr Edwin Geach's Sydney manager found himself on Saturday week. Half an hour before the curtain went up on the first performance of the new melodrama, "The Broken Home," the leading man, Sir Jefferiton Taite, met with an accident, which made it impossible for him to appear. Mr Marlow, the manager, saw Mr W. J. Montgomery, of the Roberts Dramatic 1 Company, on the other side of fhe street, and in a moment was asking him to read the part. '.Mr Montgomery consented, though he knew not a word of the lines, and before long, with the help of the manuscript of tho part, was navigating in good stylo the chequered course of the hero. It is a particularly long part, and 'the vicissitudes of the hero seem to be exceptionally harrowing. But so well did Mr Montgomery manage, that the piece suffered but little. Theiro was, of course, some humour. When the heroine enquired in passionate tones, "Do you lovo mc very much?" the man who had come to the rescue lost his place for a moment, and paused before he found he had to reply, "Why, what a question! To be severed from you would wreck my whole life." This hiatus in a tense situation is reminiscent of Mark Twain's famous French duel, in which his principal, after carefully rehearsing a farewell speech to France, forgot it when tho great moment came. "I die—l die " he cried (he was quite untouched), "per<L__ion.! what do I die for? I <Vli-r— that—that —France may live!" There was another awkward moment when Mr Montgomery lost his manuscript- in a. tussle with the villain, and had to recover it before he could continue his defiance. On another occasion he was so absorbed in his reading that be politely shook hands with lus wife bofore leaving her for a minute. But it was a plucky and successful performance, and the. audience cheered him again and again. Tlie life story and ap"A preciation of the late White Mr C. E. Nelson, Tohunga." licensee of the Geyser Hotel, Whakarewarowa, contributed to the "New Zealand

Times"' by Mr James Cowan, aro of exceptional interest. Mr Cowan, himself an authority on the Maori, says that Mr Nelson was perhaps the foremost Maori scholar of his day. He published no books end wrote no articles, but every student of Maori and Polynesian in _\ew Zealand know of his unique faculty of getting at the root of problems iv native history, philology, usages, and folk-lore. Ho knew several Polynesian dialects. Hebrew, Sanscrit, Arabic, and cognate languages, and was able to bring a wonderfully erudite mind to boar on tho problem of the origin of the Maori. He was about the first to suggest that tho Maori was akin to the HamiticSemitic peoples of Arabia and parts of Africa, and ho supplied the Rev. Herbert Williams, who is compiling tho new standard Maori dictionary, with a list of between 2000 and 3000 words unrecorded in dictionaries. His knowledge of Maori mysticism was profound. Mr Cowan calls him a white tohunga. Ho had been schooled in the early days by some of the real old

•'medicine-men," and he had a strong belief, based on experience, in the mysterious powers possessed and exercised by tho native priest. So deeply was he steeped in Maori priestly lore, that many Maoris regarded him as a real tohunga. His career was pecked full of adventure. He went to sea at tourteen, and before he was twenty had been in every ocean, and seen an immense amount of wild life, having served in all sorts of craft from whalers to slavers, and American clippers to Arab dhows. With a companion lie walked 140 miles through Brazilian forests and lived on monkeys ; he served on a slaver and was captured by an English man-of-war; whaLed in the stormy Southern Ocean; ran an Arab slave dhow into an Arab port at night under the uoso of a British warship. Helf a century ago, after ho had got his masters certificate, ho came to New Zealand, and worked as shipbuilder, bushman, sailor, trader, surveyor, native land purchase officer, and interpreter. He was ono of tn© first white men to settle in the Kaipara, where he learned most of his profound knowledge of the Maori. One ot his visitors at Whakarewarewa was a. British naval captain who ha%_ been a midshipman on the warship that captured him some fifty years be'oro.