Large and Small Runs.

Otago Witness, Issue 2661, 15 March 1905, Page 23

Large and Small Runs.

TO THE EDITOB. Sib, — Tour second leader on this matter, like your first, is admirably judicial, and will have been read with much satisfaction. Incidentally, I am pleased to 'find that certain hints which I had read in a particular way need not be so accepted, and I dismiss this department of the matter with relief. I think it is merely necessary for me now to remark that the recent long letters of your correspondent " Son of the Tussocks" (whose zeal for indefinite subdivision might, if I may respectfully say so, have been usefully applied to his own pseudonym, which is quite- a " vast sheepwalk" in itself) appear to have been written under a slight misapprehension. I was not giving your readers the political history of /' Son of the Tussocks," but that of Sir John M'Kenzie, late Minister "of Lands. Tho Minister may have been as much your .correspondent's inferior in land administration as the latter modestly makes out, but the fact remains that in my blindness I chose Sir John, and not your correspondent, for the subject of my humble historical review. For this offence I can only plead having really believed at the time that, as between the two men, the public would find the greater interest in a recital of the late Minister's connection with this matter. However, my error has now been so profusely repaired by the injured party himself (the process. I notice, affording him such undisguised pleasure as to nearly cause him to forget he was writing anonymously) that I am sure I need offer no apology for the opening I gave him ; and it therefore now only remains for the public to endorse your correspondent's claim that the superior interest and importance really attaches not to Sir John M'Kenzie's. but to his own .view. In that case somebody of my profession will be wanted again. I have, unfortunately, written myself out, and cannot offer my services; but after reading your correspondent at considerable length upon iiimsclf, I cannot doubt that such a one will experience no difficulty in finding for the benefit of posterity another Historian.