Storyettes.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 7847, 8 July 1911, Page 15

Storyettes.

On a largo estate in the Scottish Highlands.it was the custom for a piper to play in front of the house every weekday morning to awaken tho resndents. After an over-convivial Saturday night, however, the piper forgot the day and began hin reveille (can it bo played on the pipes?) on Sunday morning. ino angry master shouted to him from the bedroom window: "Here, do you not .know the fourth commandment? And the piper sturdily replied;; ■‘Na*, axr, but I* ye’ll—hie—whustle it 111 hie try‘it, sir." <

Not long ago a pair of rooks built anest in a tree in a certain gentleman sgrounds. The owner was delighted at the prospect of having a rookery practically at his back door, but the farmer who owned the surrounding land did not look at the matter in the same light. Ihe farmor was no great lover of crows, and he gave his sons orders to kill them at the first opportunity. One morning the farmer received this note from ma neighbour: ‘'Sir : I wish your boys would let my rooks alone, aam trying to make a rookery." The farmer changed three words and returned the note; ‘‘Sir: 1 wish you would make your rooks lot mj crops alone. I’m trying to make a living.”

Some little time ago, when tho bishop suffragan of Thetford was opening a bazaar at Norwich, apropos of “bleeding" people in a good,cause, he told a story of a man who was ordered by the doctor to be bled by leeches, and whose wife on a subsequent visit of the medico, sand: “Those little worm things were uo good, so I got a ferret and put it on him, and it did him a power of good.' This account of an incident was related by a missionary in bis attempt to convey to his youthful audience ; some idea of the vastness and loneliness of the Australian continent- At a wooden house he colled at (far from tho beaten track) occupied by a man, his wife, and little daughter, the mother, related how when a neighbour called to see them some time previously her little girl ran into the house excitedly crying out, “Mother, hero’s another thing like daddy!” The child had never seen any man but her father.

An American manufacturer visited a* exhibition of the Arts and Crafts in London, the society founded by William Morris, Walter Crane and others for theencouragement of artistic handicraft and decorative art. After walking through an exhibition that, from tho standpoint of art at least, has not before been equalled in England, he said to a companion, , “Well, sir. these things don 1 interest me any. S. could turn out a thousand copies of each of them by machinery. Look at that copper dish. If I wanted to, I should a aie and . stamp -cm by the gross.

The useful potato, although introduced into England by Sir Walter Raleigh in XSSI was for many years little cultivated or appreciated. In James I. s time it sold for two shillings a pound, and it did not come into general use m many parts of the country until the end of the tighteenth century. Mortimers "Gardner’s Kalondar," published in 1708. describes potatoes as being “very, like Jerusalem artichokes, though not so good/’ and adds, “they may perhaps prove useful for swine.”-