A COMPLAINT.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume IX, Issue 1656, 22 June 1887, Page 2

A COMPLAINT.

To the Editor of the Star. Sir, — On Tuesday morning last received a telegram from a gentleman resident a few miles from Stratford, j:e* questing me to send him some medicine by the 1.50 p.m. train. Immediately upon receipt of the telegram the medicine was sent to the station, and duly booked to Stratford ; and you can therefore imagine my astonishment when a messenger arrived on horseback, sent here expressly lor what ought to have reached the patient many hours before. Upon enquiry at the railway station this morning, it was found that the parcel had been overlooked, or, at any rate, not sent. Sir, I consider such carelessness in the highest degree reprehensible, and I further think it should be a matter of honor, if not of duty, with the railway officials, that parcels known to contain medicine should receive precedence, or at anyrate be sent to their destination without fail by the first train after the parcel is booked. The result of the neglect complained of was that a man lying very seriously ill was kept without his medicine for many hours, and was, further, compelled to send a mounted messenger a distance of nearly fifty miles in all, over a bad road and in bad weather. — Yours, &c, L. E. Prichard. American reporters of the Fat Stock Show at Chicago spread themselves by introducing an original couplet as a heading to each class. That above the Shorthorn class : — • A model thou, fit for survival, A pattern true for all to rival/ That introducing the Hereford is — 'The picture of contentment, see he stands ! Meek and submissive to his feeder's hands/ , t and that heralding the Aberdeen-Angus cattle is as follows : — ' A sonsy chiel ye are, 0 Doddie ! , Wi' humly heid and hardy boddy/ The poetical reporter is said to h»Y« hailed from Great Britain.