PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1979, 28 January 1892, Page 25

PASSING NOTES.

On what plea or pretext are we who live in New Zealand expected to find money for the rescue oi gutter children in London 1 Is London too poor to support its own most necessary charities? We shall be asked presently, I suppose, to subscribe to the London hospitals, and to pay off the debts on the London churches. Here v a Rev. Mr Mayes who is diligently carrying round the hat for Dr Barnardo's "Home." He has collected LSOOO in Australia, and is intent on increasing this sum by another thousand or two collected in ,New Zealand. There must be something queer, one would think, about a London charily that finds it necessary to go bo far afield for support. Not money enough to be had in the world's metropolis to keep alive an institution for rescuing the waifs and strays of ii f s own streets 1 Then I say that there must be something particularly questionable about that instilwion. I know nothing myself of Dr Birnardo and his doings except that he is an adept at advertising. Not in the newspapers — oh, dear no I — nothing bo vulgar. The Barnardo advertisements reach you through the post ; every English mail is loaded with them — circulars, magazines, begging appeals, I should say that the money spent in publishing to the ends of the earth the virtues of Dr Barnardo's Home would go a long way towards liquidating the advertising account of Pears' Soap or Beecbam's Pills. No doubt in all three cases advertising joays.

And here let me set down that there is amongst us, going to and fro like a beast of prey, a begging apostle whose particular department of philanthropy is more remote and unintelligible than even Dr Barnardo's Home. This is a " Chaldean priest "—so his testimonials describe him— a minister of the " Church of Mesopotamia," whose business in the colonies is to raise funds for a Sunday school at Nineveh 1 I have seen this mendicant Mesopotamian about the streets— a

black- visaed, frotizy, villanous-looking eon of the desert, armed with a greasy collecting book, but my information about him is derived from one of his victims, a wellknown cleric, who expressed to me his profound disbelief in the Sunday school at Nineveh, albeit he had reluctantly contributed 5s to its funds. " What was Itodo 1 ' ha asked plaintively, — •• the man had letters from people all over the colonies— Bishop this and the Rev Dr that— setting forth the urgent spiritual needs of the Ninevites, though I suspect they knew no more about it than. l did. Thfire was positively no getting rid of the fellow after I had committed the folly of consenting to examine his papers ; he stuck to mo like a leech, and I was afraid at one time I should have to ask him to stay to dinner. But luckily he shambled off as soon as he had pouched my two half crowns." "Yes," said I, "and, like Dogberry, you thanked God that you were rid of a knave t " To that remark my clerical friend made no audible response, though there was a suggestive twinkle in his eve. As for the "Chaldean priest," he is doubtless still on the war path and making war pay for war, according to the well-known Napoleonic rule. The hotel bills, &c, of these mendicant globetrotters come out of their takings, a fact we may remember when invited, as we shall be presently, to enthuse and cash up for Dr Barnardo's philanthropic " Home."

Lord Onslow goes away in three weeks or so, but as yet. there is no single authentic word of his accessor, and ib looks as if New Zealand were to be left to the tender mercies of the Ministry, tempered by Providence and Sir James Premlerg.ist. Like all good Liberals, I am personally well content with this arrangement, feeling assured that in the absence of a Governor Messrs Ballance and company can easily hold their own against both Providence and the Chief Justice. None the less, however, the delay in Downing street is passing strange. There is a distressing possibility that in the maelstrom of Imperial politics and the perplexities bf an impending general election Lord Salisbury may have forgotten all about us. But no : what with defaulting harbour boards and progressive and duplicate taxation the English capitalists have us in lively remembrance at the present moment, and what they remember Lord Salisbury will not be allowed to forget. The likelier hypothesis is that he is in a dilemma. His stock of eligible young peers may have ran out, or they are funking the Wellington drains, or, what is worse, Mr Ballance's demand of references and testimonials. Anyhow Lord Salisbury had better be quick or we shall dispense with the imported article in favour of the local product. With Sir George ia the North and Sir Robert in the Sonth we need never be hard up for a Governor.

Of the many wise thinga done by this Ministry, one of the wisest, mejudiee, was to send the Governor on a tiip through our lakes, mountains, and sounds, just before be leaves us. There are pestilent" people, I know, who would refuse all credit to the Government in the matter, and declare that Lord Onslow went of his own motion, and in a stern endeavour to get the flavour of the Wellington drains out of his nostrils. But honour to whom honour is due, say I. A pleasure trip it wae, but grave considerations of State policy underlay it none the less. Not that I ignore the drains. On the contrary, it was a point of the Governmen policy^ to extenuate the slinks of Wellington in this way — one of the few points, if all tales be tru-\ hereon his Excellency acd his responsible advisers have been heartily in accord. But more than this. He has to run the gauntlet of many farewell banquets, and it is a matter of colonial importance that his liver should be toned up for the emergency, and what better tonic could be devised ? We want him to leave us with unimpaired digestion and unblurred remembrances of our mountains and our mutton — the two best things we possess, always excepting, of course, the Liberal dispensation under which we are privileged to live. He is a young peer, somewhat given to talking and writing, and if he carries away these pleasant reminiscences he may perchance talk and write of them to other young peers, who in their turn may acquire a taste for New Zealand lakes and New Zealand lamb — a consummation devoutly to be wished, for it imports the spending of much good English money, and that's what the Government is aiming at— or ought to be.

My note last week about Hamburg lotteries has provoked a correspondent (Conservative, and — yes, a Scotchman) to heavily rebuke me for inviting the Government—" this Liberal Government, falsly so-called, but licentious and restrained by no scruples " as he puGS it — to foster the sin of gambling. Another— Scotch also, but of no political complexion — strongly approves the idea, and instances Monaco, a principality where loans and taxes are alike unknown, the Budget always shows a surplus, and the sole revenue is derived from the tables and the tourist traffic. He disposes of the moral side of the matter with a curtness distinctly profane :

The State has nothing to do with morality. The State wants money, and money doesn't smell. Business is business, and bosh is bosh. Bad, this, very; but worse is to follow:

We want to open up our New Zealand scenery ? Then let the Government start rouge efc noir tables ab Rotorua, Taupo, Wanaka, Milford, and all the divinest points of it, and the thing's done in a twelvemonth, or I'm a Dutchman. Say rather a beatheD, for no decent Dutchman would utter such sentiments, and I decline to give them further publicity. His sophistical picture of vast throngs of tourists who " establish their health by travel and exercise, elevate their minds by contact with the snblime and beautiful in Nature," and replenish the public treasury by the thumping profit the Government could make out of the tables— all this goes into the waste paper basket. Indeed, my only reason for quoting him at all is to supply Bishop Moran with a shocking example of the results of our secular tystem. True, my pagan correspon dent doesn't say in so many words ho was brought up in the public schools, but the bishop and I will steadfastly refuse to believe he could have beeu brought up any* where else,

The leading artists in pulpit sensationalism used to be Spurgeon, Beecher, and Talmage, but there is a preacher in New York just now who is able to go " one better" than any of them. At the Broome street Tabernacle the Rev, Dr Tyndall recently gave a discourse on " Biblical Snakes," beginning with the old serpent which b3guiled our greatgrandmother Eve in the garden. Descending chronologically he came next to Aaron's rod. When commenting on the snake which Aaron produced by casting his staff upon the ground in Pharaoh's presence, the reverend doctor threw down on the platform a big blackthorn, and then, stooping down, rose again with a serpent sft long dangling from his fingers. It appeared alive and squirming, but it was merely an imitation one. The sensation which it created among the congregation, composed of the very lowest classes of the city, was electrical. After this came the snakes whose acquaintance is made by those who look upon the wine when it is red : Pourtraying a man in the throes of delirhtm tremens, and who was convinced that he had snakes in his shoes, "he would reach down like this," and the clergyman suited the action to his words, " and then straightening himself he would wave an imaginary snake above his head with a maniac's yell of triumph." As Dr Tyndall said this he waved with a wild shriek about his own head another imitation snake which he had pulled from his shoe. " The effect on the audience," says the narrator, " was again very marked, and two men who had perhaps enjoyed personal experience of d.t.'s, hastily rose and attempted to leave the church, but found to their dismay that by the doctor's orders the doors had been locked." He had yet another sensation in store, and wasn't going to permit his horrified audience to decline it. "The glasses in the liquor saloons you frequent, my brethren," he continued, " may be of cut glass or crystal, with a cheery sound when they clink together, but there is an invisible snake at the bottom of every one of them." As he uttered these words in the most dramatic tones, the reverend gentleman placed upon the pulpit a glass, apparently filled with wine ; whilst the congregation watched breathlessly he struck a mateh — on his leg— put a light to the contents of the glass, which were chemicals specially prepared for this sermon, and suddenly a hideous, writhing, snake-like thing, several feet along, arose out of the glass, and squirmed over its edge into the pulpit. As this was going on, Dr Tyndall stood on one side and, pointing to the snake, cried, " The next time you like getting drunk think of that ! ' After reading this our local Prohibitionists, it is to be hoped, will make haste to send for Dr Tyndall. Their hired lecturers hitherto have been remarkable chiefly for a plentiful lack of originality. The same old arguments, the same old anecdotes, the same old statistic?, the same old stock poetic quotations,—we are tired of all this. Speaking for myself, I feel that tbe moral appliances for converting me to Prohibition are at present totally insufficient, and I fling the whole responsibility on the ljcal committee. If these gentlemen have any proper sense of duty they will open communications immediately with the sensationalist of Broome street Tabernacle.

After all that has been said and sang in praise of the Holy Ooat of Treve?, one chief virtue of that venerable relic of antiquity remains as yet' uncelebrated in prose or ver3e, although, curiously enough, it is the one solitary virtue which nobody can deny. You may not be able to believe in that Holy Coat — the " venerable r«lic of antiquity " may be for you only a venerable imposture — but you can't dsny that it is always possible to get up a row about it. That is the one incontestible virtue inherent in the Holy Coat — you can always get up a row about it ; and in dull times and dull places and amongst dull people that is a virtue indeed. At Arrowtown, for example (a place which probably satisfies the conditions just named) the editor of the local paper has been getting up a row about it with the local Eoman Catholic priest. Whether this row, considered as a row, has given public satisfaction on the Arrow I don't know; I dare say, however, that the inhabitants found it as interesting at lea3t as a dogfight, and that is saying a good deal. The row began about the Holy Coat, but presently the combatants forsook the original banner of their contradictions and went on to fight about something totally different. That is the beauty of this kind of row ; you begin about the Holy Coat, but Heaven only knows what you will end about ! In the Arrow case, the point finally at issue Eeems to be whether it is the editor or the priest who writes the worst English. The editor has submitted this critical question (which touches him in the tenderest point) to three brother clips, the editors of the Australasiarj, the Canterbury Times, and the Otago Witness, acd they unanimously give it up. Both write bad Eoglish, say the editorial referees ; which writes the worst is merely a question of taste. This seems a cruel decision, but the litigants may be consoled. Messrs Moon and Hodgson have proved to demonstration that all our classical writers have written bad English, and 'hat, on the point of grammar, one of the greatest offenders known is no other than Lindley Murray I I exhort therefore the Arrowtown editor that he be not discouraged, and the Arrowtowa priest that he cheer up. For the public entertainment let them " at it again " and keep it up 1 Cms.

The recommendations of the Laud Board resisting the method of dealing with Otago runs, the leases of which expire in February of next year, are published elsewhere in this issue. The consideration of this matter was taken in committee, and the result was, by the decision of the board, not made available for publication until yesterday morning. At the meeting of the Land Board yesterday the business was of an ordinaiy character, and the more important matters were adjourned, to bo dealt with at a future meeting.

The many friends and admirers of Mr S. R. Studman, the well-known cyclist, will regret to hear that he.met with a very serious accident, which was very nearly proving fatal, on Tuesday morning at Elmgrove farm. As it is, his racing career is probably at an end, and that just as he was in excellent form for the championship meeting to be held in Christchurch next week. Mr Stodman had been superintending the sinking of a pump with a derrick and monkey, and was in the act of

fixing a new length of tubing when the man winding up the monkey carelessly wound it too high and it trigged, coming down with almost the full blow on Stedman's head, which was driven almost into the shoulders. The force of the blow may be imagined when it is stated that the monkey weighed 2cwt. Stedman was unconscious for some 30 hours. He was attended to by Dr Allen, and last night he was unable to move a muscle. He will not be able to leave for his home at Riccarton for some few days. The general meeting of the West Taieri River Board, held on Saturday, was attended by Messrs Chisholm, Andrews, Bathgate, and Robertson. Mr Chisholm was voted to the chair. The clerk reported that since the last meeting L 425, instalment of principal, and Ll3B 2s 6d, interest on loan, had been paid, which caused the account to be overdrawn by LB. It was unanimously agreed that the clerk give those in arrears with their rates 14 days' notice, and if not paid by that time to take legal steps for their recovery. An account from the Treasury, Wellington, for Ll2 10s lid, interest on loan from the Government of L5Ol 18s 4d was passed for payment. Mr Chisholm was appointed treasurer during the absence of Mr Snow. According to the Taieri Advocate, settlers in the Berwick and Maungatua district are carting their wool to Dunedin, and save 6d per bale as compared with the railway charges from Henley. Police nen on baats in the various school districts at Wellington are to be truant officers, and will act under the direction of the local committees, serving notices upon wanderers' parents in the first instance and afterwards following them up by summonses if necessary. Harvesting has commenced in the Taieri (says the Advocate) on the hillside land. In some cases the oats are being cut to save the crop from the small birds. Further south barley crops are numerous and good. The Tapanui Courier reports that the fields are looking splendid in every part of the district. The general complaints that there will be too much straw, and in a few quarters very heavy patches have been laid by the constant rains. The turnip crop if anything has a little too much moisture, but the general yield should be good. The Riverton Star reports that the crops in that district arc looking well, and although much of the oat straw is sft and over it appears to be heavily laden with grain. Some good feed wheat is also to be seen, while turnips are in abundance, and looking well. On Friday last a trial of the new Lowdown Buckeye reaper and binder was held on Mr James M 'Coil's farm, Brighton. There was a large attendance of farmers from the neighbourhood, several of whom signed a testimonial to the excellence of the work done, and Messrs M'Coll, Davy, Walker, and others purchased similar machines. The crop operated on was one of green oats from sft to 7ft in height, and very heavy. The half-yearly report of the Bay of Islands Coal Company mentions that the sale of coal for the past half-year has been 12,206 tons, being a decrease of 586 tons compared with that of the previous six months. The directors anticipate that in the course of a. few months the remaining available coal will bo worked out. Exploring operations will be carried on at Hikurangi, and from the results obtained the directors are satisfied that the freehold land belonging to the company in that district is of considerable value, and will be greatly enhanced when the Kamo-Hikurangi railway is completed. There is a balance of L 1238 0s 4d at the credit of the profit and loss account, and from this amount a dividend of 7s per share will be declared. This is equivalent to 3£ per cent, for the half-year on the original capital. The proportion of deaths to 1000 of population for December was TBB in Dunedin, 1.29 in Christchurch, 2-16 in Wellington, and 1.36 in Auckland. Constable Sheary, of Blenheim, has accorc ing to telegram, returned from a 10 days' tour of the shearing sheds, where he has been inspecting the accommodation provided for the men. He reports that some places were excellent, while a number were just the reverse. In one instance about 30 men sleep and eat in a building the wall of which is not more than Bft high. There were three tiers of bunks going round the room. Several of the stationholders refused to give the constable admission to inspect. Thieves stole some gold specimens from the Tasmanian Exhibition. The humble bee has made its appearance in Wellington, having, it is supposed, been blown across the straits. The Southland News states that investors will advance to private borrowers on sound security at 6£ per cent. Within the past five months a suburban borough was assured that if L2OOO worth of debentures were issued at 6 per cent, they would be at once taken up. The Messagerics steamer Polynesien landed in Marseilles, newspapers from Western Australia 24 days old, and correspondence was delivered in London from Adelaide in 28 days, and from Sydney in 30 days. Her average speed homeward was 15.5 knots. It is claimed that the sister ship, the Australien, did even better, beating her time to Marseilles by 20 hours. Of the new steamer, the Armand Behic, even greater things is expected. At the City Police Court on Wednesday Alexander Clark was charged, on the information of the Portobello Road Board, with allowing sever il calves to wander on the Hooper's Inlet road.— Mr Holmes appeared to prosecute on behalf of the road board, and Mr llaggitt to defend. —Mr Holmes said that cattle trespassing on the road in question was becoming so frequent, and so many complaints were being received -about them, that the road board had to take action. A witness would be called who would depose that on December 13 he was riding along the Hooper's Inlet road, when he met some calves belonging to Mr Clark. The horse the witness was riding at the time was a young one, and shied at the cattle. The young man was thrown, and the horse received an injury. The information was laid under a byelaw made by the road board, which fixed a penalty of LlO for cattle wandering.— Thomas Geary, farm servant, stated that he was riding along the Hooper's Inlet road on December 13. He was mounted on a young horse, and meeting four calves belonging to Mr Clark, the animal shied and threw him off. There was no one attending the calves at the time.— James Macandrew, chairman of the Fortobello Road Board, also gave evidence.— For the defence Mr Haggitt submitted that the Peninsula Road Board had no authority to make a bye-law providing a penalty for cattle wandering on any road or street under their control. There was authority for these proceedings under a section of "The Public Works Act 1882, Amendment Act 1881." If there had been authority at any time for the road board to make these bye-laws, the fact of the Legislature taking the matter in hand over-rode the bye-laws. Even assuming for a moment that the road board had power to make them— a proposition which lie disputed entirely— a breach of them had not been proved. The bye-law under which the information had been laid was to the effect that if any horses, or cattle were found wandering on any street, road, or footpath under the control of the road board without being in charge of some person the owner of the said horse or cattle wa^

liable to a penalty not exceeding LlO. Now it had not been proved by the prosecution that the calves of Mr Clark had been wandering on ivny road, street, or footpath under the control of the road board. It had been stated that they were wandering on the Hooper's Inlet road, but it had not been shown that that road was under the control of the road board.— Evidence was then given by the defendant, after which Mr Elmer said that the bench decided to dismiss the case. It was a very trumpery one, and ought not to have been brought. If the board wanted to bring a test case they should have brought one for the trespass of cattle and horses and not for calves a few days old. The case would be dismissed, eacli party paying its own costs. Mollison, Mills, and Co. are holding a summer sale, and the firm offer to the readers of the Witness desperate bargains. It will be to your advantage to send for price list (see advt.)— Advt.