KURI BUSH.

Otago Witness, Volume 15, Issue 1562, 15 October 1881, Page 13

KURI BUSH.

(PROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) October 10th.

*• It is not the tear at this moment shed, When the cold turf has just been laid o'er him, That can tell how beloved was the soul that's fled, Or how deep in our hearts we deplore him." —Thomas Moore.

On October 7th Mr. Alexander Black passed from among us. The cause of death was the " oft-repeated Story "—a cold allowed to poison the lungs to suoh an extent that no powerful drug known to the faculty fiould cure them. Mr Black, during the threescore years which he passed on earth, was much respected i>y all who were acquainted with him ; and his death, Although not unexpected, has clothed the minds of the '.residents of this district in a mantle of gloom. He leaves a wife and large family of sons and daughters ■to "bedew his grave with tears." It may not be out of place here to state that five-sixths of the people who have snapped the brittle thread in this vale of health and prosperity were affected with pulmonary complaints. The ball that was held in the Kuri Bush schoolroom on September 80th was more successful than any entertainment of the description that has been held in this out-of-the-way quarter of the globe within the last decade. The room was neatly decorated with the flowers of the forest and garden, the fronds of the lerntree and the leaves and branches of the tree from -which an old identity used to distill whisky in the young days of the Otago Heads whaling colony, and brilliantly illuminated. The gentlemen who blew, fingered, and bowed deserve praise for supplying us with high-class music to dance to ; and the refreshments were excellent. The white props are all sown, and fully four-fifths of them will be green instead of white before this is set up ; and most of our practical farmers are at present busily employed preparing their potato and tur-nip-ground. The weather during the last few weeks has been treating us in the same manner as Mr Male Flirt does bia pretty sweethearts— one day it has been hot, the next luke-ward, and the third as cold as ice.