Intelligent Vagrant.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 237, 25 March 1876, Page 13

Intelligent Vagrant.

In answer to a correspondent I am anxious to say that I have not made a bet of £5 that for fifty successive weeks I will have something warm about Mr. Gillon, and that my remark about the initiatory paragraph each week having become his by a prescriptive right was not intended to help me in winning a bet. I know of no bets in connection with Mr. Gillon except a few I made with him in which he backed an opinion that Sir Julius Vogel would not come back, that the Abolition Bill would not pass the Lower House ; that even if it did it would not pass the TJpper ; and even if it got so far, that it would not receive the Governor’s assent. And these were insignificant bets—merely for malt and spirituous refreshment for ourselves and a few friends. Myself and friends are still thirsty, but that has nothing to do with the matter at issue. I am afraid that some one who wanted to be very flattering to Sir Julius Vogel has in the following paragraph paid him but a left handed compliment after all:—“ The Southern Cross is informed that the managers of the local insurance companies wrote to Sir Julius Vogel soon after his arrival in the colony, thanking him for his very valuable services in London in connection with improved methods of stowing gunpowder, and the broaching of cargo on board ships sailing from London to this colony.” I have read this over two or three times, and I can only make of it either that Sir Julius Vogel was thanked for his valuable services in connection with broaching cargo, or that he was thanked for his valuable services in broaching cargo. And I am sure the writer did not intend to convey either of these meanings. However, bungling workmen often turn out the reverse of what they intended. It is now a patent as well as a lamentable fact that under no circumstances can Sir Dillon Bell be Speaker of the House next session. This being so a question arises as to what is to become of the gown, bands, and lace cuffs which legislators were wont to admire so much. There would be a want of dignity in offering them to the next Speaker at half-price, and to destroy them would be to deprive the colony of so many works of art. Let them be presented to the Colonial Museum. The proprietor of a Glasgow museum purchased Dr. Kenealy’s gown and bands. Shall it be said that New Zealand is behind the Salt Market in point of enterprise ! Since we hear on every hand that the lot of a farmer in this colony, but especially at the Hutt, is one of endless misery and unceasing poverty, we must, I presume, take an instance to the contrary as merely being the exception which proves the rule. It is in this light alone that I mention a friend at the Lower Hutt who holds a small farm of 30 acres, and who is not afraid to say that, taking good years with bad, he has for somewhere about a generation managed to clear £3OO a year out of those 30 acres. What an obstinate beast he must be thus to fly in the face of experience ! To many people in Wellington a free lunch at an auction is as much an institution as is fish on Ash Wednesday. But this is no argument in favor of making the free lunch as severely simple as the earliest diet in Lent. Some of us went to a free lunch at a land sale last week, and there was an air of freedom about all the preparations which I am bound to say could not be too highly commended. Mr. Peter Laing was there to see if he could borrow an idea or two from the arrangements, and, so far as simplicity was concerned, he ought to have got half a dozen ideas. A man carried a bit of beef in a sack to the site of the auction. Then he got some potatoes from a garden near at hand, and borrowed a pot from an old settler. There was plenty of water and dead wood around, and with the assistance of these the potatoes were cooked, and behold the Free Lunch was ready. But the unaccountable prejudices of a number of pam-pei-ed stomachs made them refuse the lunch prepared with so much trouble. I have read with pleasure an account of a diggings ball on the West Coast “by a young gentleman recently sent up country to take care of an agency.” It reads very well with the exception of one bit in which the author speaks of himself and “ the other ladies and gentlemen.” Is there not an epicene notion as to the author’s gender conveyed by this. By the way, I had occasion just above to write something of reports and reporters. At the time I did so I forgot a pleasant reportorial incident which occurred here when a certain “clever fellow” was on a morning paper. He had contracted a habit of performing his duties in a vicarious manner by staying in bed of a morning and leaving his notebook in court to represent him. For his paper he appropriated the reports of the evening journal. This the evening journal did not like, and so one fine afternoon its reporter inserted a purely imaginative case, which was copied by our ingenious but not ingenuous friend, and received-due insertion

the next morning. The result was that the evening paper, in a moral sense, danced upon the corpse of the morning paper, and the vicarious reporter grew a little more cautious. How pleasant it is to be able to recall these agreeable traits of character. I like a good consistent quarrelsome old gentleman. That being so, it can be easily understood that I like Sir George Grey. He will not let the Government be friends with him. The Governor went to Auckland, and wanted no official reception, but Sir George insisted he did, and quarrelled with the Government, whose fault he said it was that here was no reception. Then nagged on every side into a condition in which bewilderment on the subject would have been excusable, the Government took what really seemed to be reasonable and rational steps to meet the “ unemployed ” evil at the Thames. But Sir George found fresh occasion for offence in this, and is at the Government tooth and toe-nail again. We all know that the Goodwin Sands were a logical and practical sequence to Tenterden Steeple. Sir George’s connections of cause and offence are as logical, and quite as practical. If, however, he is so pugnacious in the winter time of life, what must he not have been in its spring and summer.