NEWS AND NOTES.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume X, Issue 1838, 26 January 1888, Page 2

NEWS AND NOTES.

We are celebrating the New South Wales centennary in Hawera to-day, the public offices being closed. It is rather absurd.

It will be noticed by advertisement in another column that there is a further drop in the fares and freight charged by the owners of the Gairloch.

The following team will play for Hawera in the cricket match against Manaia on Saturday :— Shove, Welsh, A. Bayly, G. T. Bayly, Tonks, Jackson, Caplen, Kelling, Fraser, Burlace, and Mason.

During the hearing of the eastern Maori election petition, Mr. Justice Gillies said in reference to the election law that it was full of absurdities. If the statute were construed in the strict manner it was at Home, not a single election could be conducted without breaking some portion of the statute.

Some comment has been provoked by the use of the expression " too thin " in some recent official correspondence in Victoria. A correspondent of the Melbourne Argus points out that the Lord Chancellor is reported to have said, io giving judgment in the year 1813, that a certain distinction appeared to him to be " too thin." The passage will be found in vol. ii., of Vesey and Beanies' Eeports. There is nothing new under the sun, not even the slang phrases of the day.

The Oamaru Mail states that Mr. Donaldson's Clydesdale horse Young Banker died a few days ago. He was a prizetaker at the Highland Society's show and also at the Glasgow show, as well as at two or three other exhibitions, as a two-year-old, just prior to his departure for New Zealand. He was selected and purchased by the Hon. M. Holmes, who has bred largely from him, and has sold his colts at prices ranging from J-100 to i£525, and his fillies up to 175 guineas. In New Zealand he was always first in his class in the show ring, and as a sire of show stock he was unrivalled, his progeny standing sometimes first, second, and third.

The Federal Bank officials in Melbourne lately received from another bank in the ordinary transaction of business a Federal Bank note for liquidation which purported to be for the amount of On examination it was discovered that this note was in reality a .£2O note, skiltully metamorphosed with the object of enhancing its value by £30. At each of the top corners the figures were pasted over by two corners of iso notes, and in the body of the note the word " twenty" was also pasted over with the word " fifty " cut from the body of a .£SO note, but on the back the word "twenty" remained unobliterated. Amongst the notes in hand at the Federal Bank were two iJSO notes, from one of which the right hand corner bearing the figures " iso" had been removed, and irom the other the left hand corner, so that neither note was destroyed, and yet the manipulator, who is supposed to have been the person who dressed up the ;620-note in question, had all the material required to alter the character of the note. From one of the two notes referred to, the word "fifty " in the body of the note had been cut out, the excision being neatly covered with a New South Wales receipt stamp. The theory is that the perpetrator of this ingenious device got his spurious into circulation amongst the general public somewhere in New South Wales, and that the subsequent holder eventually saved himself from loss by passing it on an unsuspecting bank. The accepting bank will, therefore, lose the £30 difference.

The Stab Almanack and Wanganui and West Coast Directory for 1888 is now published. It will be found to contain very full information on all matters of interest in connection with the calendar, such as high water time tables, hours of sunrise and sunset, dates of sittings, and also fees of the general courts, hours and dates of closing of mails, postal and telegraphic rates and regulations, full statistics in connection with matters agricultural, with local bodies, and with New Zealand and Australasian finance, population, &c. The directory has been extended so as to embrace the whole of the coast from the Mokau down to and inclusive of Wanganui. The volume will be published at a shilling as heretofore ; a special edition containing a standard reference map is also issued at Is 6d.