Items of Interest.

Opunake Times, Volume XXI, Issue 750, 23 June 1905, Page 3

Items of Interest.

The population of New Zealand is 900,682-about one-eighth of London's population. A correspondent writing from one of the Buller country townships says, inter alia :—" The people here are not speculative, except in two-up, euchre, and such like. " One public house to 100 inhabitants is the proportion in two Westland towns. Hokitika, with a population of 1800, has eighteen hotels, Boss with-700, seven hotels. No fewer that 5807 assistant school masters in England, or nearly half the whole number, get less than £IOO a year. In one school the joint pay of the head master, his daughter and a monitress is only £BS. An assistant mistress receives £l2, a headmaster £62. A witness from Motueka who gave evidence before the Land Commission recently complained that valuers acting under Government failed to take into account the true value of orchards in making their assessments. In many cases, he said orchards worth £SO, £6O, £7O, and even £BO, per acre had been yalued at £lO. In an article in Life and Work, Mr Ballard describes the departing of the Japanese soldiers to the war. On the morning that they leave their homes a little red tablet is nailed to the gatepost, with the words " gone to the front" and the name. Some day the wife may have to go out and take down the red tablet, and put in its plaoe a black one—" killed in battle. " In the course of Father Hays's lecture at Napier the reverend gentleman, while relating an anecdote, said •« When I was a boy my mother used to say" "Dadda" interrupted a a baby in a shsill pleased voice- that was heard throughout the theatre. This unrehearsed effect brought the boose down, and it was some minutes before the lecturer could proceed. Miss Cary, an English governess, when walking near Mont. Valerian in the city of Paris, was strangled in broad daylight. Numerous suspects were arrested by the police. They ran to earth a blacksmith named Gallard, who was in the possession of the victim's watch and money. He confessed he committed the crime during an irresistible fit of drunkenness.

. Why do the Japanese always win ? A Russian war correspondent suggests a few of the reasons. She spends a million and a quarter a year on her intelligence department, against the £2OOO spent by Russia. She has a splendid line of communications, perfectly organise \ and adequately protected ; her generals work together like a machine ; and her soldiers burn with patriotism, while the loyalty of the Russian soldier is sapped by an endless stream of seditious proclamations smuggled out by the revolutionaries.

A correspondent to the Evening Post, in describing a Maori dance at Otaki, has the following : " Take your partners for the lancers 1 " The trail of the cake-walk has reached Otaki, and the lancers, as danced there, are fully one-half cake walk. But the grace that can be put into cake-walking is here exemplified, and the dance is not the rowdy, roystering scramble that it has degenerated to amongst white people in some parts. But there is a party in Ctaki that stands for the old system ; and in one corner of the hall the lancers were danced in the quiet decorous manner of our forefathers. A young Maori woman lit a cigarette and surreptitously blew clouds between the seats and the gallery. Smoking in the hall was tapu ; and outside was frost. " It's all right, " she assured this scribe, " they think it's you and say nothing. " ' • Colossal as is Mr Carnegie's recent gift of £2,000,000 as a pension fund for American professors and teachers, he has given an equal amount on two previous occasions—once in 1902, to endow a Carnegie Institution at Washington, and more recently, to Scottish Universities; while his various becefactions to Pittsburg insfcutions have reached the same figure. In a single year (1901) Mr Carnegie has given as much as six and a half million pounds to different charitable objects ; and it is said that his total benefactions have now reached £25,000,000. The largest individual gift, however, stands to the credit of Mrs Leland Stanford, who some years ago contributed £6,000,000 to the endowment oLibe university named in honour of her son. The Post's desciption of Father Hays: It was a little wisp of a man who came softly to the front of the platform, in the sombre black of bis order, with a great cross on his breast; small of stature and of delicate build and gentle in his ways ; a dark and clean shaven- face, singularly boyish and attractive, but worn, lean, and almost emaciated ; lips of a dreamer and worker, soft and earnest in speaking, quick to smile, but thin with the compression of pain and suffering; darkly luminous eyes under intensely black brows ; he has a few gestures, and practically no pulpit mannerisms ; his methods are unsensational to the point of repose; anything but the popular ideal of the man who achieves. But as he spoke he won his audience to him. His simplicity and sincerity, his lucid and graceful phrasing lulled and led them, and only at intervals was there the thunderous applause of virbrant feelings. He depends for his effect on an appeal to reason, for he does not use the revivalist's white hot weapons for the sacrifying of the emotions. Simply and eloquently he indicated the "foul and fascinating sin " of intemperance, and told of its evils with the conviction and sincerity of the man who knows, enlivening his discourse with apt anecdote and smiling humour.