THINGS IN GENERAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14808, 11 October 1911, Page 10

THINGS IN GENERAL.

SOLDIER * AND : SPORTSMAN TOO.

The other day the city was presented with the Victoria Cross that was awarded to the late Major Hcaphy. for his conspicuously valourous -■-* action ;at*Mangapiko in 1864. . Major Hcaphy-. was something of sportsman in the bid days,"and even though he was partly crippled and bore the. scars- of wounds and • the- oppressive legacy left by hie hard life, he was always a most popular and respected gentleman. In particular he is remembered as a boating enthusiast/; and an Aucklander who was "contemporary, with him in the sport,, though of a later generation, has recalled a race in which ho took part. It was in February, 1870, in the early days of the Auckland Rowing Club, when the boats used were " gunwale pigs." District races were the principal fixtures, and. a match was arranged bo-

tween the Auckland "and I'arnell Clubs. . The trophies wore half-pint pewter ootjs with glass bottomsvery. estimable ' vessels from which to sup good ale. After the first race, a return match was -'arranged, the crews exchanging boats. .Both races were won by the Auckland crew. Ihe boats used were the Manukau Maid and the Spitfire. Major Heaphy, then well on in years, and something, bent from bis hardships, was coxswain ." for the Parhell crew, and Mr. R. E. Isaacs steered ihe Auckland crews to victory, it is interest* ing to note that besides the coxswain, who was quite young then, . only ,- on,* of the Auckland crew in those races is still with -us. That is Mr. H. W. Henaerson, of Henderson, Macfarlune and Company. The other men in the boat, were -Messrs. Johnston, of Whitson and Sons; W. Brassey, solicitor)-and A. E. Isaacs, of the lute lira .of £. and A...lsaag3. ft. & Isaacs still has the pewter pots won oy the Auckland crew. ..~' ,v"THE ' BIRDS' LITTLE JOKE. '

That man will be sorrowful is as certaii as that sparks will;ny upward. V2 He ii born in pain, his little troubles fall thick upon him in his childhood. Disappoint merits, hard and insufficiently rewarded work, influenza, marriage, and bankruptcy dog .his footsteps, till' at last he dodges them through the last door that has no key. He is the one truly sorrowing creature of the earth; but he has this - fcc recompense him—-he"can laugh. 'The man •who has mirth puckers round his eyes has great possessions. In the long ; run he can balance his joys against ;Ms J sorrow sj*and find, as Robinson Crusoe is reported to have said, that he still , owes Providence two and fourpenoe.-; Thero is some doubt ■whether"he is not- the only creature that really laughs at a joke: but he cannot •claim to be the only one with a sense of humour.; I, myself, saw some smart little green red parrokeots -in . the - Christ,:eharch gardens^ play ?a « capital practical joke, and if they did not laugh they • : showed their enjoyment of it very plainly. The birds, perhaps, a dozen of them, live in a big cage with wooden walls, a wire front, and tin earth floor. There are a,few mice oil the premises, maintained;™ pood '1 health by the giwin that the parrok *?;<s / leave over, and in fearlessness oy a know■c ;ledge that .the • birds will not, and. the pub lie cannot; harm them. , One afternoon two of the mice Wandered put and nibbled some corn in a casual way,, heedless of .the litth birds, three or four,of. which were on : tho ground, while the rest held a political argument among the rafters. Quite suddenly, apparently upon a ; suggestion from one of the talkative little fellows on.' the: floor, 4b» chatter and altercation ceased." The*parro- - keets below withdrew some distance Jiom the mice; leaving lifem feeding; all. pecting. Then the birds, on the floor, with a squeal : and a. flutter, jumped into the air and landed > squarely in front of the mice. The quadrupeds .were never *«->t; astonished-before. They /: scuttled ■: for ~"-""home as" if they expected good news, and had heard the telephone bell. .;;; And ; the row those birds made could be heard all over the gardens.' ; They: were still wiving about the joke when the sun set. FOE ROADS OF THE FUTURE. The , subject ;•■ of road-construction, now .. engaging the attention of, Auckland authorities, is indeed one of the great branches ;of engineering. 5 Road-making on _ scientific principles has made great strides of late limes, but for general purposes, :• where' the requirements -idci; riot- demand enormous expenditures,; most roads are not far removed from- their ancient ?. forbears. In New Zealand people adopt as - a. rule a cleared track, alternately mud and dust, for the inaccessible North ; good :? ways ;; of, self-packing i river-bed shingle in Canterbury, where they;have such metal ; ' for;. the : asking; * and ; macadamised roads where there is stone of a* quality A that "■. will make macadam. ■ In Auckland : the : ! macadamising jjrocess works none too :: well, for; the metal is poor; and dust is an important though worse than worth- ";-; less by-product. Necessity has therefore compelled the adoption"' of;',-' at ;>■? least one ; of the more modern road materials j hence "Queen-street is laid down in asphalt. Now . ill ere *is a suggestion that star..- should %be *';.. used *to treat the other streets, so that • - the dust may, ;as . one might say; be nipped in the bud. It is easy to find i% fault with " roads. It is very hard, to discover a way of making a perfect track at .a moderate .cost." It may be of interest ■/.' to see what H. Q. Wells, in a very read- * able set of . essays called "Anticipations," has to say about the road of the future as /he * supposes it will develop under the ■?■■'■ pressure of increasing motor traffic, and apart -from the specialised ways for pedestrian traffic. " They will be very dif- " ferent from macadamised roads they, will ; s . be used only by soft-tired '-, conveyances:?; -the battering horse-shoes, "the' perpetual filth of horse-traffic, and the clumsy wheels of laden carts will never wear them. It may be , that they will have : a surface like r: that ;; of some cycle-racing: tracks/- though since they will be open - to wind and weather, it- is perhaps more ; • probable that they will be made uof. s very good -asphalt, sloped to: drain,; and '-still more probable that they, will be of some quite new substance altogether—whether hard or lesilient is beyond any foretelling." They will.-ha>»e to :be very ■ widethey will be just as wide as the courage Id • ;. their promoters goes—and if the first made are too ; narrow there will be -no ; ; question of gauge to limit the later ones. Their I ;traffic"!' in opposite ''"directions'-' 1 ' will probably be strictly separated, and it will no doubt habitually disregard complicated and fussy regulations.. ... The pro- :, moters will doubtless take a hint, from suburban railway traffic [English, not . New Zealand] and!; from the current difficulty of 'the*" Metropolitan police, and where their ways, branch the stream of traffic will not cross at a level,/ but bv bridges. Once ; these roads exist .it will be possible to experiment with vehicles •; of a size and power ouite beyond the dimensions prescribed 'for our ordinary ; roads—determined by the size of a cart ; : ]a horse can pu11...: "So we begin to see j ..the possibility of. laying that phantom horse that haunts the railways .to this day ; so disastrously." ;'- .::''-: .'-'"';'*-"•■ -■•■« :

: , THE GHOST OF THE HORSE. ; ;<! . The last sentence in the preceding para-: , ■ graph has reference to a subject referred 'to elsewhere in the same essay. Mr. ■.■■"-■■ Wells says that railway travelling is at • best a compromise. The ideal of locomotive convenience is surely a highly ■:'. mobile conveyance capable of travelling easily and swiftly to any. desired point, . ■ traversing at a reasonably controlled pace the ordinary roads and streets, and having ■ access for higher speeds to special ways. . "• . This ideal might have been kept in view . "and attained. . But there was a more -v obvious? path of development, and one immediately cheaper, and along that path 'went nineteenth-century progress, quite .., heedless of the possibility of ending in a cul-de-sac. : The locomotives were, .like all experimental' machinery, need- ••.. lessly clumsy and heavy, and \ their inven- -' tors." being men of 'insufficient faith, . in- -' stead of .working for lightness and smooth"•■"l ness of ;motion, took the easier course of -' placing them upon tramways that were already in existence—-chiefly, for the tran- , sit of heavy: goods over soft roads ; pnd .'from that followed a very curious result. :l These tramlines very naturally had exactly . , " . *■■ , •;..." '

the width of an ordinary cart, a width prescribed by the strength of one horse. Few people 'saw in the locomotive anything but a cheap substitute for horseflesh," or found anything incongruous in letting, the dimensions of a horse .determine the dimensions of an engine. It matt?,*ed nothing -from the first that the ; passenger was ridiculously cramped, hampered and crowded in the carriage. He had always; been cramped in a coach, and it would' have seemed "Utopian"—a very dread thing indeed to our grandparents—to i»Cposo travel without cramping. By inor.v inertia the horse-cart gauge, the 4ft 3Jwn gauge, hemihe contradiconte, established itself in the world, and 1 now everywhere, the train is dwarfed to a scale that mints alike its comfort, power and speed. before, every engine, as it were, trots tho ghost of a superseded horse, which refuse* most resolutely to trot more than 50 ivrdrs an hour, and shies and threatens catas-trophe-at every point and cur. 7 e. I" might, he adds quizzically, have beta worse, if the biggest horses nad -In enShetland ponies. There is hardly any reason, bevond this tradition of the bone, why the railway carriage , should not be even nine or ten feet wide.

A 1000-MILE RAILWAY. During the session of the ■ Australian i Federal Parliament definite steps will be ' taken with a view to the construction of' j the transcontinental railway. One thousands and sixty-three miles divide Kalgoorlie from Port Augusta. There is a general opinion that a large extent of the country along the line is of a sandy nature, but it would be difficult to find anywhere on the drier parts of the earth's surface a track 1000 miles in length, and including so little sand. The actual work of survey in*the field occupied nearly six months." When the first party left Kalgoorlie in July, 1908, they took 90 camels, as Well as stores and equipment. Nine-. teen tons of stores were- distributed, along the route, and water was sent out and stored in tanks at intervals of seven miles. This party included an engineer-in-chief, a superintendent of surveyors, a surveyor in.charge, and three other surveyors, and about 35 others., . With one attendant and equipment consisting chiefly of a prismatic : compass and a theodolite,-.-'.tho V surveyor-in-chief rode ahead of the main party, took observations to determine the longitude and latitude,. and mapped out the course the line is to take. To show clearly the track he had a chain knotted' at' the end hung behind the waggon. The country for tho most part is of a loamy character, and the chain left a well-defined track which .was easily fol-' lowed by the .main. survey ; party, who also took ; instructions from the engineer-in-chief, made observations! and at intervals put down posts showing the surveyed lineTo most people the post is practically the only outward and visible sign of a survey. In surveying the transcontinental line posts were put down at intervals of about half a mile. On each of the -posts the mileage was recorded, s arid notes regarding the nature of the, country were made in the field book, for use when the plans are being made. Sometimes trees had to bo cut down, to permit a clear view of the country being obtained, and all scrub had - to be removed' along- the actual route. \ country being obtained, and all scrub had to be removed along the actual route. Within a year or two the short scrub which is beginning to blot out the j survey line will be uprooted and flung asideby; the navvies^,' \ ' j, Difficult problems in the way of provisioning the men and bringing material to the. workers will have to be faced'when the actual construction is' commenced. There is so much material to be obtained that : it will take practically a year before a start j . can actually 1?9 „ m ad° W"Rh the laving of ■the*;;lines. In most great undertakings a start could be made with some Work, while "I'the bulk of. the material is- being obtained, " but with "a* railway it is a vdiffetent matter. The ; clearing of the i country and the pre- ; paration of the track: cannot go on until the rails have been obtained, because the railway itself, must -provide the means of transport for the material. " r The building 'of the lino will start from the two terminals. The men will be only a short disr tance ahead 'the ■ railway trucks, and will :be able to make rapid headway. •- . ."■ pearly £4,000,000 will be absorbed in building the lino, . and \ of that ', sum about £1,000,000 will represent the cost of rails. . One of the--heaviest; items is sleepers and ballast, winch : will also account for.more than £l,oofhooo. M Accord to : earlier estimates, it would cost £60,000 for water supply, but it is believed that, with improvement in machinery and the use of internal _ combustion 'engines*;", instead of steam this? item may be considerably reduced. While the question of gauge has , pot been, definitely i*settled, -the- general ; opinion is that 4ft*&jrin will be adopted. ; The General.