MY SENTIMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume X, Issue 2790, 7 January 1873, Page 4

MY SENTIMENTS.

[By "Snyder," in the Weekly Heiuxb.] I WBITK this on the first day of the new year, and I am taking stock of the last three hundred and sixty-five days. Looking back on the past, I feel that I have much to be thankful for. Providence has awarded to me the great blessing ol poverty, and only those who have enjoyed this eatate can speak of its many inestimable advantages. Being poor, no one ever thinks ef asking mo to accept or endorse a bill, or to lend money, or to become bail. or to go security for anything. I have no trouble in keeping myself down to sixteen Stun ten, there or thereabouts. I am not obliged to wear purple and fine linen, consequently, whether walking or sitting, I have no" uneasiness about spoiling my elothes. In worldly circumstances I am about three and fourpence better than I Wai last year, besides which I have a twogallon keg of light bitter beer in my establishment which has not yet been tapped. All these are great helps towards feeling comfortable. I hope by my unaided efforts to learn to become as content as a friend of mine who I visited a few days back in the debtors' side of Mount Eden Gaol. He had been there_ two months, he said, and unless his detaining creditor relented or eot tired of paying 12s. a-week for his support, he was happy to say he had yet got another two months to run. My friend went on to say he had never passed such a happy two months before in all his life. No one came to dun Mm or ask him to pay money which he had not got. His meals were brought to Mm with the greatest regularity. He had abundance of sleep, with clean bedding ; and the beauty of the thing consisted in Ms having nothing to way. If a slight regret passed over his mind, like a passing ehadow, it was that the gaol dietary didn't include pickles ; but he thought this trifling drawback might be assuaged by memorialising the authorities. My friend would not allow me to divulge his name. " For," said he, " if youdo.the fellow who sent me here will be for letting me out. I have got a few more creditors who may prove tender-hearted to me by being rindictive, by which I may manage, one way or another, to remain here during the greater portion of 1373, in which case I intend learning the French language, as an elegant accomplishment." Why, Socrates or Plato could have learned a lesson upon the delights of contentment from my friend, had he lived in their days or they in his. Just imagine, O, ye wordlings, ye cravers after the fat things of the earth, ye worshippers of Mammon aDd unrighteousness, the supreme fact of a fellowman being only a bottle of pickles short of complete and unmitigated happiness .' In looking back upon the events of the last year in personal connection with myself, there are one or two matters which I regret having done, and for which I hope to be forgiven. I acknowledge on one occasion to have committed a mean and contemptible action. Three months ago, in virtue of my connection with the Press, I received a ticket to attend a public banquet. Under the rascally pretence of wanting to see how the tables were laid out before the banquet commenced, I shifted the decanter of sherry which had been placed for the chairman, and substituted for it one which had been intended for the reporters. I am not going to be such a sneak as to insist that a fair exchange is no robbery. It wasn't a fair exchange at all. The sherry I collared was real .Amontillado, dry and of a full nutty flavor, without the smallest headache or acidity of the stomach whatever in it, while what I gave for the chairman's one would have been dear at a pouud a dozen. Wasn't that chairman sold that night ? —and the Amontillado was grand. But it wasn't the square thing to do, and I am sorry for it now, because I think the chairman was ill all the next day. Something in connection with that banquet struck me as peculiar at the time. There was a long Hue of dishes placed on the k7anqueting-tables,each of which contained a pair of delicate chicirens embedded in delicious gelatine, which quivered and trembled under the brilliancy of the lights, most lovely to behold ; but I noticed that not one of these chickens, roasted to a delicate brown, had their livers, as is usual, tucked into the folds of their left wings. The next day at noon, I happened to enter the house of the caterer of that lanquet, and I saw him sitting down to a late breakfast. It consisted chiefly of chickens' livers, simmered in cream and servedwith bread-sauce. Then it struck me that what I observed at the previous night's banquet was nothing at all peculiar. I have to confess of another act ol great meanness committed during the latter half of the year now numbered with those which have passed away. It was the stealing of a half-sovereign from Mrs. Snyder's portmonnaie while she was asleep; and afterwards, when she came to tell me of her loss, blowing her up for being so careless of her husband's hardearned money. I throw the act up into her face to the present hour, to the bringing of tears into her eyes. I have nothing else in particular to regret having done or having left undone for the year 1872. I think, taking it altogether, that the world we live in is a very good world indeed, and the people a long way off from being so bad as some people would try to make out. We laugh and rejoice a great deal more then we sorrow. Most of us would sooner do a good turn to each other than a bad one. And there are a great many more good people than there are bad. I have found it so in the course of a somewhat chequered career, and so I believe have most others. We remember a pleasure longer than we do a regret, and forgive a wrong sooner than we forget a kindness—that is if we are composed of the material which goes to make up the kind of men and women which a merciful and beneficent Providence intended we should be. I .shall, to the end of my days, feel deeplyrgrateful to old Tompkins for the recipe he gave me of a new way to cook rock oystere. "Procure them fresh, Sayder," he said to me one day. " Pick out the middling-sized ones. Clean out a frying-pan, into which melt a lump of fresh butter. Drop in your oysters and fry them to a light brown. Take them out. Squeeze a lemon over them and sprinkle with cayenne pppper. Eat with the crust of a new roll spread with butter slightly pickled, and then te'l me afterwards what your idea is of the seventh heaven." Talk about Heliogabalus and his dish of peacocks' brains which cost the price of building a Great Eastern or Sojer's pate of nightingales' tongues, for which he charged the Marquis o f Waterford a hundred guineas, why, neither are to be compared to the dish that cost me, upon a close estimate, not more than fourpence halfpenny. Of course I can't speak with anything like a dead certainty because I never dH eat of nightingales 5 tongues or peacock*' brains, but I "knoir I feel as grateful to Tompkius for that recipe as he.did to me when I referred him to a cheap but honest lawyer to carry him through the insolvent court, which h.e tells me he finds is as easy as going down a flight of stairs with broad steps and bannisters on.both sides. I wish, when I come to think of it, that the p.irsons some of us sit under wouldn't be so ]i<rd upon their hearers. They are all pointing out to us our bad qualities aud saying all tlie time uever a

word in praise or encouragement of the good that is in us. They tell us that our hearts are as hard as the nether millstone; that we are choke full. of P" d f eand ,™££ and vexation of spirit; that we banker for the lusts of the flesh, and all that sort of thine. I demur to these accusations. I don't believe they exist to anything like the extent which parsons would have us believe. I say we are a charitable, a lovintr and a tender-hearted people, tafcinK us in the lump. When that poor man, a few weeks back, in the uttermost depths of his great misery, lost heart and hurried himself out of the world, who was it that helped to comfort his miserable wife and family ? Who was that gave liberally from their substance to set them in the world, so that poverty at least should nob have to be added to their other many griefs ? Who was it did this, but those who are denounced as hard ot heart and overflowing with pride and lust j and many other of the deadly sins P Show us, any of us, almost all of us, a case ot gross injustice, of cruelty, of neglect, or of hardship, and our blood rises, within us, and we set to work to ameliorate the condition of the sufferers, and we do it with no weak heart, no niggardly hand, and no want of serving a good purpose. The parsons don't appear ever to balance accounts as regard our moral or religious assets. They are for ever looking at the debit side of things and ignoring what ought to be placed to our credit. Just a few doors down the street from where I live, there was a poor woman taken before her time with a mother's paugs. Her husband was many miles away, and there was no one wlio seemed to care about this miserable creature. But what did my next door neighbour do? Why, hearing of the thing, she hastened to her drawers and took from out them the baby-linen of the one only child which God had vouchsafed to her, and which in His far-seeing wisdom He had taken from her a few short months after it had been born into the world. These baby-clothes had been embalmed in perfumes and kept apart sacred from everythine else. But the mother of the dead infant took them all out. She went over to the suffering and helpless woman. She tended on her; stopped by her two whole days and nights, and for all the mornings and evenings until the woman had recovered, and was able to hold, with all a mothers intense love, a healthy boy child to the fountains of life which gave it nourishment. Was there no good, then, in the ministering angel neighbour of mine P Where was the hardness of heart, the pride.the vanity, and the deadly sins which her minister in liis denunciations had laid to her account along with all the others of his hearers ? And this neighbour who had done such a good and tender and merciful work, I had iu my own mind set down as a mean, cantankarous, selfish woman. It was only a few days previous I heard a child knock at her kitchen-door and say, " Please, ma'am, mother says will you be good enough to lend her your frying-pan to do some eggs in for father's dinner ?" And what was this woman's reply P—this woman who had taken her dead infant's clothes, treasured up to her like ao many precious jewels, to give to a sister woman in a mother's distress, who killed for her the tenderest chicken from her yard, to make her broth; who broke upon her own rest, and forsook the cares and duties of her home, to do a generous act ? This woman's reply was, " Tell your mother that if the Emperor of China was to send over all the mandarins whose heads he hadn't cut off, or whose bowels he had not ripped up, to borrow my frying-pan, I wouldn't lend it him; and so you can go back and tell your mother I won't lend it to her. , '' I hated that woman then just in the proportion I esteem her now. The fact is we have all got our frying-pan bad points about us, which, with uncharitable people, are pormittpd to smother up all the good that is within us. It was old Tony Weller, addressing his son, said, " Sammy my boy, women are rum 'uns. You never know when you have got 'cm nor where. If you mother did have a habit of kicking over the traces, she never refused to take the collar when the coach was near to a bank." My sentiments and Mr. Weller's sentiments as regards women being " rum' UUB," exactly concide, although I don't quite see what all this has got to do either with the year that is past, or the one that was born at 12 o'clock last night. What I mean to say is something like this—that if black means what is wicked, and white Ineans what is the right and proper sort of thing, there is then a good deal more white than black among us. Now, if I was privileged to address a body of listeners at this time of the year, I should (after ordering silight liquid refreshments all round) just say something as follows: "My dear friends, taking you altogether.there's a great many good points about you, aud there's not a few ~ba& ones. Now I just want you to consider whether you do not experience a great deal more comfort when you bring your good points into play than you do when you exercise your bad ones. If any of you to-uight, before you go to turn in, will just sit on the edge of your bed and find yourself able to say, I have not told a lie to-day; I have done nothing mean or shabby or dishonest; I have spoken kind words to all; have belied no man or woman's character ; and I have in all things done what has been right according to the light that is within me ; then, I say, if you can only say this, have your last smoke for the night, tumble off your clothes and turn into bed, when, if you don't feel what it is to have the blessing of Heaven on you I have lived in vain. This is my JS : ew Year's offering to all. For the rest, and having reference to worldly matters, I have to say—Steady on the break, and don't bounce too much."