ECHOES OF THE WEEK.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1196, 1 February 1895, Page 21

ECHOES OF THE WEEK.

Satire’s my weapon, bui, I’m too discreet To run amuck and tilt at all I meet. Pope.

BY SCRUTATOR.

TTTIOB “ nastiness,” uncharitableness and, JJ indeed, downright caddish ness, I fancy the following, from the Post of Monday last, will take some beating, even in its own columns. The writer of the article having welcomed Dr Wallis to the See of Wellington, proceeds as follows : In his. immediate predecessor he will find an excellent example of what to a And. The greater contrast he „can establish between his own conduct and that of his predecessor the more certain is he to command the respect and affection of the members of his Church, and the greater will be tho probability of his becoming a power for good in regard to the social and religious life of the community.

Now, whatever may have been the small faults of the venerable gentleman who was Bishop of Wellington for so many years, surely now that he has retired from active work, now that he is an aged man, now that he is so infirm that he cannot leave his house, now that he must be, in the ordinary rule of nature, within no great distance of relief from all earthly cares, responsibilities and troubles- —surely, I say, the above paragraph can only be considered by all decent-minded people as a low thing, a scurrilous, an indecent, an utterly abominable thing to appear in a public journal.

XXJTHATEVER may have been the exv ▼ Piimate’s faults and foibles—many of them have been wofully exaggerated—the long and arduous work he has done in the service of his Church and adopted country far outweigh them. At a _time when the brown and the white raceswere at strife, it was Bishop Hadfield who practically saved this province from the horrors of a savage war, and in hundreds of ways and on hundreds of occasions he carried out to the letter the sacred injunctions of the Divine Peacemaker, and prevented evil, and sometimes bloody work being done. Putting aside his. clerical career—upon which, by-the-way, the Post writer is in no way to be considered an unprejudiced or competent critic—Bishop Hadfield was a man “who did the State some service.” Surely, at a time like the present, the Post’s vicious diatribe against a venerable Christian gentleman comes as a horridlyaiscordant note in the midst of an otherwise general harmony. The Superior PersoiTs idea of what constitutes good taste is decidedly inferior, and I am not surprised to hear that his latest and worst outburst of spitefulness has been received in Wellington with universal disgust.

WITH reference to my suggestion re a Wellington Carnival Week a correspondent writes as follows : Dear “Scrutator,” —Wellingtonians reecho your sentiment expressed last week in the Echo upon a Carnival Week. To be the Empire City and yet offer no continued inducement for visitors to spend at least a week of their money hereabouts is to be out of date, a mere spectator, instead of leading the procession. Bs you have said, there may be a difficulty in arranging fixtures ; but so surely as Rome wasn’t built in a day or faint effort never won fair laurels, the will for a Carnival Season shall execute its deed. I am afraid Anniversary week falls awkwardly for the A. and P. Show, as our country cousin has “ crops *' on the brain and “ fires n in his eyes at that period of the year. Still, there are other fixtures which could be transferred to that week—competitions in tennis, chess, cricket, bowling and rowing. The suggestion enfolds a grand prospect —may it unfold in full fruition !—I am, &c., Carnival.

A CORRESPONDENT, “ May-it-be-so,” writes me as follows :

Dear Scrutator, —We are actually waking from our lethargy, stretching our great

limbs like a giant after a sound sleep, and in the effort threatening to move things ! The City Fathers have decided to look after the washing of their children, and their deputation to the Premier the other clay was for all the world another picture of “ You Dirty Boy ’ —Young Wellingtonia being the boy 1 Weil, .may he get his dip ! say all of us. Then the railway serpent is uncurling its length, and, its back crowded with backcountry kiddywhackies, is drawing them to Petone Beach, where they will be promptly turned into Sea Urchins. Good on ’t. And our city kiddies are also to be taken to that lovely strip. What a chance for investors in bathing machines. Well, well—we ve had a good tuck-in in the Blanket Bay where slow-coaches arc laid away ; the activity of up-and-doing may result in much good.—l am, &c., May-it-be-so. MANY of the admirers of Dr Conan Doyle's now famous detective, the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, were vastly disappointed when the author at last made his hero disappear over an Alpine precipice, and for a time at least, so it was said, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were done with. But did he die? There’s the rub. The Boston Record infers, in a bit of quiet and clever satire, that he did not, or that, if he did, he has been reincarnated in the body of a hackman of that city whose inhabitants proudly entitle it ‘‘The Hub.” Conan Doyle has recently been lecturing in the Siatas, and the Record’s story, a little condensed, runs a 9 follows : “He arrived unannounced and unattended at Boston by express from Albany. ‘ You may take me to Young’s Hotel, or Parker’s perhaps V he said to the intelligent h ckman. * Pardon me,’ was the reply, “ but I think you will find your agent, Major Pond, waiting for you at Parker’s,’ Doyle hesitated for a moment, and then took his seat. Pulling up at Parker’s the pleasantlooking traveller took out his purse. *lf it is not an intrusion, sir,’ said the cabman, “ I should much prefer a ticket for your lecture; if you have not a ticket, your visiting card with a line in pencil will no doubt be honoured by your agent.’ Thereupon Doyle is said to have been inwardly moved. ‘ Look here,’ he said, ‘ I am not accustomed to be beaten at my own tricks,’ he said almost gruffly ; ‘ toll me how you knew me, my business, my agent, and the rest, and you shall have tickets for your entire family*, and a pocketful of cigars besides.’ ‘ Of course/ said the Bostonian hackman, as Dr Doyle lighted" a fresh cigar and leaned against the door-post of the Parker House, *we all knew that you were coming’ on this train —that is, all the members of our Cabmen’s Literary Guild/ was tlie half-apologetic reply. ‘As it happens, I am the only member on duty at this i station this morning, and I had that ad-

vantage. If you will excuse other personal remarks, your coat-lapels are badly twisted downward, where they have been grasped by the pertinacious New York reporters. Your hair has the Quakerish cut of a Philadelphia barber, and your hat, battered at the brim in front, shows where you have tightly grasped it in the struggle to stand your ground at a Chicago literary luncheon. Your right over-shoe has a large block of Buffalo mud just tinder the instep, the odour of a Utica cigar hangs about your clothing, and the overcoat itself shows the slovenly brushing of the porters on the sleeping-cars from Albany. The crumbs of doughnut on the top of your bag—pardon me, your luggage—could only have come there in Springfield, and stencilled upon the very end of the “ Gladstone,” in fairly plain lettering, is the name of “Conan Doyle.”’ ‘Now I know where Sherlock Holmes went to when he died,’ said the great detective storyteller. ‘ That leaves me free to write another set of adventures; but they must be confined to the locality of Boston, Massachusetts.’ ”

THE humour of examination papers is not confined to the Old Country whence emanate so many of the laughable examples of school-boy blunders which appear in colonial papers. According to an Invercargill paper, a candidate at a scholarship examination recently held in that far-away southern city sent in the following delightfully original description of the battle of Waterloo :—“The battle of Waterloo was fought between the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon. Wellington was at a ball in Paris when a letter came to him telliug h ; m that the enemy were w iitii g for him. He heard the cannons roaring, and" he knew at once wbat it meant. The people in the ball-room told him it was only the car, but Wellington himself knew what it was because- bis father wai killed in battle. Then rushing out into the midst of the enemy, he was struck by a cannon ball and fell dead on the spot. The people turned pale at the sad sight. After being so merry and happy lie soon fell in misfortune.” I have read some very fantastic descriptions of Waterloo from French pens but the above certainly beats even the’ Gallic records of that memorable fight. I wonder, however, where the Invercargill boy got his imaginary “ car ” from. There are tram cars in plenty in King Leopold’s pretty little capital nowadays, but there were none when the Duchess of Richmond gave her celebrated ball. I wonder, also, whether the Invercargill’s lad’s essay is a genuine juvenile production, or whether like, I fear, so many of these alleged schoolboy blunders, it owes its origin to the brain of a clever and hoax-loving pedagogues. It seems almost too good to be true.

TALKING of Waterloo, I see by an English paper that the guides who show you round the battle field are still just as loquacious and just as humorously murderous in their treatment of the English language as they were when Scrutator himself visited the place, heigho, a good many years since, it is now. The Waterloo guide has got hie lesson off by heart, and he “ speaks his piece ” as the Yankees say, as glibly as a third standard " kiddy ” giving a stock recitation. As an example of English “ as she is spoke/’ the

following sample speech of the Waterloo guide of to-day (taken from the paper in question) is not without interest: —“ This, sar, is the ole well; it is mark in the book of Victor Hugo ‘ Les Miserables/ This is where they put three hundred cadavres. You see that piece of wood on the floor (ground) ? Ho was on the top of the nord gate the time of the bat. This place where we are now, he is the kitchen garden. The night before the bat he is occupy by the Coldstream Guard Hiuglish, and he make all those loophole to fight wit the French in the orchart. The Hinglish call this place the cemetery —because that’s never took by the French, you know. This stone he is a monument for Blackham, aningeuiur that make those loophole the night before the bat, and he be kill here just tho day of the bat. This is dir Cotton, this stone; he buried at Mont St. Jean. Three years ago when the Duke of Cammbridge come here he take the two I skeleton, because they make a large monument for the soldiers killt in Brussel. Now Iwego to house. You see this door ? That is mark of bullette, but the bullette can’t pass through because the door was too thick,” Mark Twain’s famous Italian guide, '.whom the “Doctor” exasperated so much with his purposely idiotic questions about Columbus and his handwriting, apparently quite equalled in garrulity and in his callous assassination of the English tongue by his Belgian prototype.

A SOUTHERN weekly which makes great pretence to being a “ highclass family paper” has recently gone in largoly for illustrations. Japan and matters Japanese are topics of every-day conversation just now, and with a laudable enterprise the journal in question procured a photograph of a street in Tokyo and gives a half-tone engraving from it in one of its latest issues. The choice of subject was, however, in curious taste, for the street shown in the illustration is the principal thoroughfare in the notorious Yoshiwarra, the quarter wherein, by local law, are forced to dwell tho whole of Tokyo’s l registered prostitutes. A nice subject indeed for illustration in a “high-class family paper ”! t

I HAVE been reading the Christmas number of the Review of Revieivs, in which Saint Stead plays the original storyteller, and cheerful] y sketches out an horizon of “busted” British peers, with their ancient castles and domains “ scooped up” by millionaire mandarins from China. The story, which is surpassingly silly, even for Stead, is entitled “ The Splendid Paupers,” and thereby hangs a tale. A year or so ago the beautiful Lady Warwick, formerly Lady Brooke, declared, “We are not a rich aristocracy. We are, many of us, deadly poor, and all the poorer because tradition, society, pride, make us go on living beyond our means. It is not as if the aristocracy could set an example in this matter. They have been forced to go the pace which the nouveaux riches set. We have to live when corn is 30s a quarter as when it is 50s; but not only that, but to keep abreast, if not ahead of the wealthy tradespeople who have come into land. The result is that we are, many of us, little better than * Splendid Paupers/ Now, as a curious commentary upon poor Lady Warwick’s pitiful wail, there appears in a recent issue of a London paper, a paragraph stating that Lady Warwick’s magnificent sable-cloak, which cost £BOO, and which had been stolen from her carriage, had been dug up in a field. Fancy this poor dame of high degree wailing in print that she is “ deadly poor, and behold one cloak aloue that she owns cost £BOO ! I wonder what the Warwick tenant farmers, who also “ have to live when corn is 30s a quarter as when it is 50s/' think of her ladyship's moans over the sore straits of the blue blooded ones. Stead s story begins well, but ends in rank burlesque. The best point in it is the deadly attack he makes upon the many plutocrats who are soi disant Liberals, j and yet who have made, or are making their j fortunes by the most abominable system of j sweating. These are the men whom the j English workers are now beginning to find out and out they will have to go from the I Liberal parly, or out the party will go holus ; bolus at the next general election. It’s a ’ pity Stead’s story ends so weakly. He has missed a grand chance of making a big hit.

THE half-holiday is only a moderate success. As far as I can see, there will be any amount of confusion caused by some shonkeepers adopting Wednesday and others Saturday. What it will have to come to in the long run will be one day for the whole Colony, no exemptions whatever and wheresoever, and it s a million to cue that the day eventually chaser* will be Saturday. It will take time to effect; this, but it is the only solution of the difficulty, at least 6uch is my humble opinion. It isn’t Mr Reeves’ fault that there should be any confusion, for he had to accept a half measure rather than risk the whole. At present, however, it seems to me the height of absurdity that the representatives of two mere handfuls of people, like Karori and Johnsonville, should have had the power to dictate to the City of Wellington which day should be selected. Next session I hope Mr Reeves have the courage of his opinions and go the whole hog. By that time the colony will, I fancy, have found out that it is better to have one day and no exemptions whatever. We shall see, The Council need not be feared if only the great mass of the people make up their minds on the matter.

A COUNTRY paper quotes the Christchurch Press as saying “ it is currently rumoured that, as a result of an inteiview between Lieutenant - Colonel Hume and a number of prominent Prohibitionists, several police changes will be made in the Christchurch district, including the transfer of at least one member of the detective branch, the grievance against whom is that he has relatives in Christchurch iu the licensing trad©,” The

Christchurch paper from which the abovo paragraph is‘alleged to be taken is somewhat given to the circulation of canards, but if tho rumour referred to be true, Colonel Hume has done a most improper thing in receiving a private and secret deputation of “prominent Prohibitionists;” and if he has taken their statements for gospel, and acted upon them, he has acted still more improperly. The average “ prominent Prohibitionist”—judging by the Wellington members of the fraternity—are habitually given to making the most rash and reckless statements concerning’ the police, and they have no mote right to be listened to, as a body, by Colonel Hume than would have a deputation, secret and private, of men directly interested in the liquor traffic. I hope, and, indeed, believe that the rumour is without foundation. The proper pei'sons to formulate charges against the detectives are the Licensing Committees, and the charges, if made, should be detailed, supported by reliable and unprejudiced testimony, and, what is more important, should be made public property through tho columns of the public press.

THE remarks passed by “ Scrutator n a few weeks ago on the attitude of the so-called “ leading journals ” of Australia towards the Seddon Ministry have been, 1 am glad to see, reprinted by several important provincial papers “ on the other side,” for marked copies of which I have to thank a Sydney correspondent, One journal, The Maryborough Standard, reprints the full text of my remarks in large type and in one of the most prominent positions in the paper.

THE Melanesian Mission is an excellent institution, and the efforts which it is proposed shall be made by each Anglican parish in this province to help on the good work of which Bishop Wilson has taken charge, have my best wishes and sympathy. But there is an old saying that charity should begin at' home, and before the various parishes contribute with any amount of liberality towards the conversion of our dusky “brethren” in Melanesia. I hope they will see that the salaries of their own spiritual pastors and masters. are duly paid. The Stratford correspondent of the Mail this week tells how the payment of the local clergyman's nominal stipend has fallen sadly into arrears, and I’ believe" the same state of things occurs in many other parishes. The country parson never gets an extravagant screw, and the least his congregation can do is to pay it up promptly. Clergymen have a great many expenses incidental to, and unavoidable, indeed, in their position. The country parson is a hard-worked man as a rule, and. although he is decidedly a labourer who is worthy of his hire, it is notorious that his salary is too often allowed to get into arrears. By all means let the excellent Melanesian Mission be assisted by the various congregations, but let the local clergyman's salary first be paid in full.

Mr JOSEPH EVISON, once better known as “Ivo,” the freethouglit lecturer, lias, it appears, left Christchurch and settled in Sydney. This is the individual who, on platform and in print, was Avont to cherish the sweet delusion to his soul that he could politically smash Mr W. P. Reeves. He achieved the “honour” of being at the bottom of the poll at the general election, the gentleman who was to be pulverised being on top, and as to his journalistic successes in New Zealand—well, he is now in Sydney, looking for a billet, I suppose, while Mr Reeves is still a Minister of the Crown in NeAv Zealand. The Bulletin, 1 notice, delivers itself of the opinion that “As a humourist, Mr Evison had no rival on the M.L. press/’ I quite agree with my Sydney, contemporary. Mr Evison was, happily, quite unique! .Also, I am not aware that Maoriland is pining for any more “ humourists ” of the Evison type.

WAN lED ! Some extra . strong stage furniture for the “ New Boy ■’ Company. In one case, at least, sofa-v, it’s not worth a Tanner !