THE INTELLIGENT VAGRANT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4887, 20 November 1876, Page 2

THE INTELLIGENT VAGRANT.

(From the New Zealand Mail.)

Quia acit an adjiciant hodienue crastina summsa Tempera Di Super!.— Horace.

X feel satisfied that the Rev. Smalley was not thinking of me when he talked about newspaper writers, who only mentioned the pulpit in order to point impious puns and profane jokes. My object is always to assist rather than to retard the spread of practical religion, and it is with this in view that I mention a circumstance which occurred here last week, and which is a pleasing instance of conversion. Mr. and Mrs. Oldstick had not gone to church for many a long year, when suddenly Mr. Oldstick won a sweep of £25 on the Melbourne Cup. Meeting him in the street two days afterwards, and congratulating him with a certainty of being asked to refresh myself at his expense, he accepted my congratulations, and said that he had bought Mrs. Oldstick a prayerbook and a hymnbook, and had taken, sittings at church, where he purposed regularly attending in future. Now there is neither wife nor fun nor pun in the above, and if there be impiety or profanity in it, all I can say is that the same must arise from the fact that, barring names, the story is simply true. Jack fitting you are one of the very best fellows X have ever met, and lam not going to write a word in depreciation of the merits of your semi-nautical novel “ Frank Calvary,” now_ being published in the Saturday Advertiser. But, dear Jack, do not use the words “our hero” too often. They form, I will own, a moat brilliantly original mode of mentioning your chief character, and no author has ever used them previously. But despite their undoubted beauty they are apt to become wearisome by repetition. Six times in the last weekly instalment of your tale is, you will admit, above the average of former weeks, which ran only as high as five. Despite all our pride in Wellington, it musfe be admitted that it is still far behind other places in successful enterprise. We cannot, for instance, do here the tlfings that they do in Canterbury. The Press says —“ The City of New York left Wellington on yesterday morning at 8 o’clock, and arrived in -Lyttelton last night, and was forwarded by a special train at .an early hour this morning.” There is no use in denying it, we cannot come up to this. Fancy the traffic manager of our little railway being asked to forward the City of New York to the Tipper Hutt. He could not do it. The confession is humility, but truth is great A correspondent writes to know, as an abstract principle and without any local application, if I think it fair that a gentleman who has the employment of laborers for certain public work should employ one or more of those laborers to work on his own garden at the expense of the public. To which I reply, circumstances alter cases. Put me in the gentleman’s place, and I might hold a different opinion to that I entertain at present. One of the up-country townships in Otago has got a Mayor with a most appropriately festive name. He advertised in the local paper that the 9th of November should be kept as a public holiday, and signed himself David A Jolly Mayor. I am astonished that none of the newspapers have noticed the hospitable attentions which in Wellington have been bestowed upon Captain Sims and the scientific gentlemen on board the cable steamer Agnes. I believe they have been perfectly overpowered by the courtesies rendered them here.

A mean attempt has been made to deprive my graceful and accomplished friend -JVTr./ Gillon of the honors he has successfully as a dramatist. I hasten to neutralise that attempt. He did dramatise “ Lady Audley’a ~ Secret,” and, one point excepted, it is a beautiful dramatisation. Its interest would have-. - been heightened, however, if he had introduced ' a final sensation scene in which Lady Audley, previously to being sent to a mad house, should have pushed the talented dramatist himself down the well. He might have engaged me permanently to assist by . putting the coyer on the well subsequently and sitting on it. For the sake of playing so important a part, I would not have haggled on the quea- - tion of salary. Some one has left a bunch of radishes at the office of the Wairarapa Tims Letter. He has since called and exchanged them for a bunch of thistles, apologising for not having previously consulted the tastes of the Editor. “ Angles” in the Australasian tells of some curious answers recently given by children in. the Victorian State Schools. There is in_ this colony an ex-inspector of Denominational Schools in New South Wales, to whom I heard a singular answerreturned. He had asked a child “ what did Adam and Eve do when visited in the Garden of Eden by their Creator after their fall ?" To which the answer was promptly returned, “ Please, sir, they planted themselves in the bush and gammoned they couldn’t hear.” A correspondent, who says he can write acrostics, sends me the following, which hesays I will find neat and appropriate :

Greasy in body, gross in mind. Will insult talk, but if you And 111 consequence in shape Of blows Will follow and involve your nose, Then only by some gander's qniU A chronic spite you strive to fill The acrostic, I admit, would he inexplicable to me but for a clue to its meaning, with which my correspondent furnishes me. He says if £ take the first letter of the first line, the second of the second, the third of the third, and so on, my trouble may be repaid. He says, “ a fisher” will furnish me with an acrostic on “the gander” next week. I notice by an American paper an anecdote peculiarly French. A gentleman at an hotel complained of his next-door neighbor, because he drove the fleas out of his own into the complainant’s room.