THE PERKS OF A COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XIII, Issue 4665, 26 October 1876, Page 3

THE PERKS OF A COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT.

Tms dever ".Specialifciea" in .the ijng very justly onr hearing lAtely.—Country "correaponaente of the press 55?®? e ?. em P* from-the opwationStofTihis; law. In small communities • this; Iβ especially.true. Wholihe correspondent is who writes from among their fittle circle those^ staking letters, putting facts sotersely Ind occasionally just letting the cracker end of a sentence fall on the back of some one who has been kicking (locally) over the traces 13 quickly known. If the correspondent be a married man of course his wife is in the secret, feels her station as spouse of the powerful correspondent of the—say, Queenslander, and does not see the point of hiding her influence entirely under a bushel. Where is the use, she very reasonably thinks, of being able to influence public, opinion, and ''show up" people's tricks, unless they know of it, and bow before one's awful might? So she just whispers it in the deepest and most sacred confidence to Mrs. Seville Gervice, the P.M.'s wife, who has been putting on air 3 of superiority, and to a few other ladies who 1 have afisumed a tone of equality which is quite out of place, considering everything. Iα three weeks it follows, as a matter of course, that if you were to tell a working bullock on the town reserve that Mr. So-and-so was local correspondent for the Queenslander, the beaat would poke you in the ribs with his horn, wink his sleepy eye, laugh in your face, and remark that Queen Anne was dead, and he heard a milking cow blowing the news you brought more than a week ago, and that, every native dog in the scrubs round about knew it by that time. Thenceforth the correspondent's life becomes a burden to him. If he writes that there is good graas_ everywhere about, Messrs. Sheepeize, Beaulock, and other squatters in the neighbourhood make it their business next court day, when, they come in to sit on the bench, to step over and swear at him for being such a officious as to go bringing all the travelling stock in Queensland round that way to eat them up, and get boxed with their flocks. If he, on the contrary, records the fact that both grass and water are scarce, Mr. Bawbee, the storekeeper, comes round for settlement of that little account, and inquires, in a sardonic manner, if he is fond of making a- fool of himself, and frightening every bit of trade out of the place, since not a earner or drover will come near after reading his lies in the paper. The reader mayfill up the blanks with seasoning to taste. And both squatters and storekeepers go about pereuading everybody that the unhappy corespondent who has told nothing but truth and has touched only the comparatively safe subject of the weather and state of the country, is doing his beet to be the ruin of the district. Then, perhaps, he writes a fnnny story about the P.M. aed the lock-tip-keeper's wife, carefully guarding against recognition of the real parties, and the editor happens to be drunk when that comes in—editors are always drunk, vide last dying issues of the now defunct " Queensland Church News"—and the funny story escapes being cut out. Everybody knows what happens then. Every man, woman, and child in the place get mixed in the business somehow; the store-keeper does a brisk business in horsewhips; five females go into hysterica within twenty-four hours, eleven men get drunk, and thirtytwo swear. Somebody comes and says highly spiced things to the correspondent— whose wife somehow gets the business so entangled that she imagines he has been offending as well as the P.M., and who wants a separation—and the correspondent knocks him down; is joyfully arrested by the lock-up-keeper in his other character of constable, can find no one to bail him, and cousequently is scoffed at through a grating for five days ; by the indignant spouse of the lock-up-keeper, and finally is heavily fined by the P.M., and Messrs. Sheepseye, Beaulock, and Bawbee, J.J.P., in petty sessions assembled."