General News.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLI, Issue 8142, 16 November 1905, Page 6

General News.

The love of the gruesome was well illustrated in a crowd of men who clustered at the Bank of New Zealand corner, Cbtistchurch, on a recent evening, just after a man had a leg almost severed by the wheels of a tram. A quarter of an hour passed before an ambulance van could be secured, and in the meantime persons, filled with morbid curiosity, almost trampled on the victim of the accident in their eagerness to gaze at a sad spectacle.' Some o£;tlie bystanders, iv mistaken kindness, wanted to bundle the injured man. into a cab, and were restrained only by the intervention of a gentleman who knew that the consequences of tho rough-and-ready proceeding might be disastrous. Eventually, when the van arrived, there was such a surging of the idly curious around it that the removal of the sufferer iiito the vehicle could not be accomplished without great difficulty. Kentish hop-pickers take pleasure in evading the payment of railway fares, according to a Saturday Review sketch writer. " One ticket for three is the hop pickers' plan. No. 1 buys his ticket, shows it, gets on the platform, passes it over the palings to No. 2, and conceals himself under the carriage seat. No. 2 does the same. No. 3 sits above them till the train starts, when they emerge dusty but triumphant. Grudge the moo ey ? _ Not tb ey. It is their idea of fun. One stationmaster has a story of a stalwart Irishwoman who came yearly with a small husband, and as regularly returned without him. One fatal day someone dropped a heavy box on the homeward bound lady's bundle, which instantly began to swear fluently. She made a practice of smuggling her man through the barriers in a sack.- She confessed, quite unabashed, only grumbling a little at having for once to pay the legal fare.