THE COLONIAL BANE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2210, 9 July 1896, Page 36

THE COLONIAL BANE.

Wellington, July 6.

At a meeting of the Wellington shareholders of the Colonial Bank it was resolved to take no action upon the recent disclosures pending the report of the parliamentary committee ; also, that Mr Vigera be requested to resign hia position as liquidator, failing which steps ba taken to compel him to do go.

There was a young lady of Niger, Who smiled as she roJe on a tiger, At the end of the ride, the Rirl was inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

This old nursery rhyme illustrates the credulity of the female character, and the fondness for beautiful male animals ; for, without doubb, an African tiger is indeed a beautiful animal, but man is au animal, notwithstanding his humanity, and we are surrounded on all sides by numberless examples of his innate savagery. The hopeleis misery of women tied by the marriage bond to debased, drunken, ignorant brutes who are- dubbed by Nature's laws at lords of tho creation if, perhaps, one of the most lamentable things to be witnessed in modern times ; for the Victorian era exhibits, perhaps, the highest type of refined civilisation known in history, with its swfal opposite splendidly depicted by Charles ' Dickens, in his characters of Bill Sikes and Fagin. We hear of philanthropy in its thousand ' forms— the noble efforts to rescue lads from the surroundings cf vice and ciim°, but it seems as hopeless a task to stop juvenile depravity ss the engineering impossibility to - dam Niagara. Why, it may be asked, all this disquisition ? . It is to impress by all the force of pen the desirability to onltivate habits of philosophy and reflectiveness, and here we are met withthb beneficence of Nature, which gives to the Old Dominion Virginia the weed brought to Eng- . land by Sir Walter Rsleigb, the inhaling of which in the form' of Indian Chief Cigarettes induces that calmness of thought and happy frame. of, mind under which the present condition of socalled civilisation may be pondered over with benefit.

The charred remains of an unknown man have been found under a burning tree en the Keilor Plains, Victoria.- v A little girl named Liddle has been horned to death at Blaokheatb, near Horshwa (yiotari*lt thtoagh tor clothes catching fir*