PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2181, 19 December 1895, Page 41

PASSING NOTES.

Mr Hawkins, S.M., is nothing if not sententious. His phrases have a fine Johnsonian ring about them, and his sentiments are asweighty as his sentences— of course Ido not mean biß fines. I, have read bis latest deliverance at Balclutha with pleased surprise. Until reading it I was always under the fond delusion that a magistrate's functions came to an end with the oase or cases he decided. It. now appears, however, that this is a mistake, and that part of the whole duty of » stipendiary magistrate con&istK in delivering ex cathedra lay Eermons on the wisdom or unwisdom of legislative enactments. In the present case " Oivis " cordially agrees with Mr Hawkins on many of the points made in his sermon. As the worthy magistrate points out, the result of attempted enforced prohibition in Clutha (as in more I distant places) inevitably is that " whatever success has been achieved in preventing the sale of liquor has been obtained at the serious cost of a mischievous impression on the general morality of the people, and I of loss of respect among them for the law, i inasmuch as that law is a law which can only be carried out by the employment of spies and informer?." Bravo 1 -Mr Hawkins. These, be brave words indeed I I do not know that " Civis " himself could have put it so well . and so sententioualy. , Paradventnre the whole address from which the above remarks are extraoted might be circulated in the form of a tract; to strengthen the loins of the weaker brethren among the 11 moderate drinkers." Then perhaps Mr A. Wilson would no longer need to be ashamed of the " harmless necessary " spirit stand so ' thoughtlessly presented to him the other day by his former pupils of the Girls' High School. As to the prohibitionists, they had better take care. I am aware chat in this adjuration I shall be compared to that West Coast paper which began a leading article by saying, "We warn the Czar of Russia " ; but Mr Hawkins's remarks are pregnant with meaniDg. OE course, he has been termed a " fool of a magistrate " by no less a person than the Minister for Lands ; but there are sfcill a great many persons who will feel disposed to attach some weight to the judicial dissertation. There is a point in connection with the matter which is deserving of a moment's consideration. The law waa^ there, said the magistrate, and he was' bound to enforce it, and be would visit convictions with the severest allowable punishment. I raise my hat to Mr Hawkics, but I tru6t that bia threatened severity may not have the effect of compelling each man to make his own liquor after the manner of the Oalmucks, who by fermentation convert mares' milk into an intoxicating liquid ! called koumiss, and subsequently by distillation into another intoxicating spirit called ruck. They have done this for centuries, and an experimenter named Bsrnstein, of Berlin, has now shown scientifically how it may be done ad infinitum. At a recent show in England he demonstrated that even such by-products of the dairy as whey and buttermilk could be converted into beverages that conld be made alcoholic or nonalcoholic as the manipulator desired. The base of the. invention is a peculiar bacterium, which dissolves the casein without previous curding, and its action may be regulated according to- the will of the manufacturer. The meanlne of

this is simply that science has placed at the disposal of such as care to use it the formula by which all races of mankind may make some kind of exhilarating liquor, even out of the most unpromising materials. If it enables us to make an alcoholic liquor out of buttermilk and whey, we may soon expect to see even the Chit ha licensing district freed from the ntcoasity of visiting spies and informers, for no one will have occasion to buy : he will simply m&ko his own. And with the cessation of the demand there will cease to be a temptation to sell. lam afraid my militant prohibition friends are prone to lose eight of this fundamental ttuth. The bacterium, like the poor, is always with us : prohibition is of yesterday. For the Brat time for several years I visited the recent Agricultural and Pastoral Show a' iSihuna Pack. To my untutored eye it ij|> e^rrtd a huge success. Toe day was perlcec. The crowd was immense, well-dressed,, and good-humoured. As for the exhibits, I confess I did not examine them critically. Agricultural and pastoral pursuits are not within the ken of " Civis." To me it is impossible to distinguish between the shorthorn and the Hereford, whilst I have a. fixed conviction that those sheep are' crossbred ! which experts declare to be merinos. Oae mechanical exhibit did, however, attract me not a little. This was the milking machine. I have never milked* a cow, indeed have rarely seen one milked. But the process has always had for me a kind of ideal charm, and milkmaids are associated in my, townbred mind with some of my tencierest fancies and most poetic aspirations. The sight of the milking machine at once dashed my fond ideal to the ground, and reduced the process to a sordid money-grabbing business, Alas, poor milkmaid t thy race is almost run. A new and nameless poet mourns as follows the " Djom of D^lly, the Milkmaid " :— O Dol'y ! with thy eyo.s of blue, And cheeks as red as roses, With lips that steal the cherry's hue, And breath as sweet as p:sies ! P Do'.ly ! tripping on thy way Midst Naturejs faire-t scenery, What is this rumour, s<*y, oh ! say, Of milking by machinery ? So, Djlly, thou to Fate must bow ( And our regret grows keener As thy poetic figure joins The thresher and the gleaner. Arcadia is again borftft, And bards in sorrow mutter : " There's nothing now idyllic loft Connected with cur butter." It is bow a considerable time since R. L. Stevenson died in his lonely island home, but his friends and admirers are still writing about hi 9 life' and death. Stevenson eeems to have been one of the few— the happy few — men of letters who arouse enthusiasm in their friends as well as amongst their' readers. It is an open secret that practically , the whole of his adult life was passed in a. constant struggle against a fatal disease, and that the travels that he describes so well were mainly in vain pursuit of a modicum of. health ; and yet what writer of the present day has written more pleasantly, more brightly — has done more to enliven our dull existence and make life better worth living for thousands of his fellow creatures? His latest "appreciation " is written by his kinsman and co-worker — Mr Lloyd Osbourne — and appears in "Scribner's Magazine " for October. From it may be gathered something of ' what Stevenson was— even inhis latest days at Samoa — to those who were privileged to call him friend. A'as ! poor Stevenson, f never can read the story of his tragic life and still more tragic early death without being reminded of the words he uses in one of bis earliest essays — written at a time when he was quite a youth — and yet strangely prophetic of his own brief and brilliant career. He is speakiDg of the fine saving of the Greeks that those whom the gods love die young, and thus he describes such an ending : — " Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the millet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, ■ trailing with'him clouds of glory, this bappystarr'd, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land." ' . Bat a truce to such moralising. It is (he office of " Oivis " to be mirthful rather than mournful. O»ie, would scarcely think ofgoing " for fun " either to a doctor, or to a lawyer, and yet those two dull but respectable bodies of men have lately been providing' the citizens of Dunedin with a good deal ot I amusement in a quiet way. Apart from the Adams Lister libel case — which is not without its comic aspect,— we have had this | week the amusing spectacle oE the great Dc Stenhouse actually making— and admit- | ting — a mistake 1 Such a combination of circumstances has never before happened in all my long experience of the poetic doctor. His detractors Bay that he has frequently made mistakes (and who has not ?), bat | never until now would he admit that he had done so. Of a truth the mistake in this case was a small* one. He merely sued " the wrong roan " for the trifling sum of 50i. What-ia a paltry 50s to a poet 2 As the poet (I beg pardon, the doctor) said in court : Why did the defendant not wiite and say be was not the party 7 Quite so. Sarely it waa the duly of the horny-banded son of toil at Clinton to make sure that the poetic doctor had tued " the right man. 1 ' It would indeed be one of " misfortune's bitter rubs " were the learned leech forced to leave his labours, his sonnets, and bis Education Board- palavers to condescend to such a "sordid labour" as the correction of a twopenny-halfpenny summons in the Magistrate's Court. No wonder that Dr Stenhousa in hss wrath wished to " charge tha defendant with collusion " (e»en nfter he bad erroneously charged bim with L 2 10j !) A correspondent puts me this poser :— •'Keeping, as you do, a watchful eye on the churches, and knowing everything, to -quote a recent correspondent, also having cathedral dignitaries her*, can you supply any answer to what the Rev. N. J. Devereaux (Church of ! England) propounded at the Church Congress iin England : 'As a hard-working clergyman he n*d often wonierad what dean* and canons

did, and what they existed for.' The De»n ol Norwich being in the chair, this sounds like bearding the lion in his den. * Labby ' joins in with « Many people have been puzzled with the same question, 'and amongst them, " Yourfc truly, "Mobe Light." " More Light's " compliment npon my omniscience nerves mo even to this task. Th« functions of a dean are many and obviouseven to the nninitiated eye. Of course, the initiated eye can see of what use a dean, with bis chapter— for a dean without a chapter would be like the number 10 with, out the figure I— may be to a bishop. Any dictionary will Inform the inquirer of tha ecclesiastical uses of a dean. I prefer to consider the question in its general . appllcation. And here a wide area presents itself. I consider a dean is pre-eminentlj useful as a foil to his bishop ; or he may be called the attendant luminary npon th« episcopal planet. In the matter of gaiters, again, he has a clear,' antithetical purpose, and serves to correct the possible impression that asceticism is a corollary of ecclesiastical dignity. MathematicaJUy, as well as physically, he might be called the second or third expansion of a bishop ; ecclesiastically, ,he might correspond, homos jpathicaliy, to the second or third attenuation. Though -his title is " Vary ReveronoV'hqmay, as Sydney Smith suggested, he " Rather Reverend," but ! you can hardly call fchat a use; Bat I stick to the gaiters theory, for the only deinVe have ever had has demonstrated that thpse garments— if they may be called such— may be worn with credit to the wearer. Ah for a csnoD, he ia Simply a pop gun compared with the dean. ■*■ The irony of fate has brought to the front a proposal to organise a " national " shilling testimonial to a great-grandson oE Robert Burns, wbo, it seems, has been discovered in the humble capacity of keeper of a powder magazine near Edinburgh. It will be noted that the only claim put forward on behalf of this descendant of the bard is that; "he has a fine .dark eye and a well formed head ; a quiet, unassuming manner and dignified bearing." It is indeed put forward tentatively that he has the rheumatics, but he makes light of that-, as well as the lowliness of his lot, as being trifling matters altogether unworthy the • attention of the descendant of a man who despised mere earthly ills. I trust it will not be imputed to me that I am a Philistine when I say that the proposal altogether fails to elicit an answering gleam of enthusiasm in my bosom. We have precedent for it that memorials to the dead shou'd always bear some relation to the wishes and opinions of the deceased, and if anybody, bad proposed to Barns to honour someone merely because he was the great-grandson of some eminent person .we may .easily guess what .the, 'answer. wpuld r ba from the arch d&piner of hereditary nobility. I admire Burns— reverentially — and worship him with the aid of a glossary. With this assistance I have discovered that the word " cow " acquires a new and beautiful poetic meaning if yon call it " cop," and I Buspeot much, ot the conventional' admiration for Barbs rests on the same "basis. These reasons suggest themselves .as objections should I be waited 'upon for that shilling, but there are many others that might be adduced. Civis.