NOTES ON CURRENT EVENTS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 5, 4 December 1884, Page 2

NOTES ON CURRENT EVENTS.

Only tho other day (says a Home paper) a sentry post, at the Government offices m St. James' Park, was discontinued after some twenty years of needless vigilance. Some time about 1864 a military commission sat m a baclc building abutting on the park. In order to mark the solemnity of the occasion a member of the ranlc-and-lile was appointed to do duty on tho spot, which was thus held at the point of the bayonet from ten to four o'clock every day. The commission accomplished its work,vfhicll was thus, no doul>t, to draw up a repoulf which was relegated, as such documents are, to the pigeon holes of the department moving m the matter, and there left to mildew and dust Anyway, tho commission disappeaied, but the sentry remained. Two decades passed away, and still Thomas Atkins, with his red coat, his fixed bayonet, and his seventy yards of sentry-go, passed up and down the brief parade fixed by his superiors. There ,was nothiug to guard, and he guarded it. He had been forgotten, io fact. The magnates had overlooked the fact that the purpose for which he had been instituted had ceased to exist, and it was only recently that a chance disI closed to them the waste of fighting-stuff they had been committing. The sentry was discontinued, the post which knew hi>n so long will know him no more.