The Author of the Washers and Manglers Bill.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 6480, 24 September 1892, Page 4

The Author of the Washers and Manglers Bill.

In his "Political Portraits " in the Canterbury Press, "Phiz" draws the following portrait of Mr Huckland : — •' By some chance 1 imve re.lcyitv.l Mr Auckland t<> the rail end of ihtse sketches. Why I know not. It fell that way. Yet he is no inconsiderable person, either mentally or physically. There is much natural cleverness, and not a little educated smartness about him. Only, somehow, he hardly does himself justice. .Neither the legal lore, with which he is, no doubt, stowed up to the hatches, nor the custody of much money, inherited and self-ac-quired, have killed the jocosity of him. He is humorous with a fat sort of humor— a Falstaftian, or may be, Rabelaisian wit. Often he rises with the air of one sworn to be serious or perish. He begins forcibly and ends farcically. It is as if he had for familiar some goblin that, by all others unseen, danced before him, beckoning and luring him to tho bogs of absurdity. In person ho is not Fiilstnftian yet. But there are possibilities in his figure which might permit it, a decade or so hence, to develop into one of the types which Gustave Dore employed when he illustrated Balzne. At present Mr Buckland has the appearance of a man who enjoys his daily bread and lives much in the open. He is above rather than under the middle height, dark as to his hair and eyes, full-blooded, and by no means bad looking, even if a trifle inclined to coarseness. He has lately taken to wear in the House, and with some ostentation, a blood -red comforter of many folds. This has the eifect of palinghis complexion by comparison, giving him a certain butchorised or bucoaneerish aspect. Mr Buckland is a long way ftom a bad sneaker, though he is rather loud — a Boanerges, a Son of Thunder. He is no slouch at stonewalling, but he goes ahead a little too fast on such occasions, so that he reminds o.te of s\ man who has just clambered to the top of a steep hill with somching he wants to say very badly. The Government do not love Mr Buckland. He finds the raw place on a Minister with the unerring skill with -which a mosquito taps the richest vein of a juicy stranger. He can ask a venomed question with more air of meek chorubim about him than is good for any mere mortal to have. He can smile while he stabs, and so sweetly smile that a seraphim seeing would bo angry and envious. He strikes me as being a good-natured man, with a capacity for dancing fandangos on his enemy's grave."

In Savfiii, Samoa, all the villages that have joined the London Mission and the Roman Catholics keep the new Sunday as in Apia, but the Wesleyan party decline to fall in with the new regulation, and keep the old SuntUy. In one village they have two Sundays every week. The Samoan Government recently corrected 'their time-keeping to correspond with their longitude. Those who may be troubled with baulking horses should read the following clfpping from Our Animal Friends :— -An officer of the police detail said recently : " When I was ri mounted policeman I learned a most humane and kind way of curing a baulky horse. It not only never fails, but it does not give the slightest pain to the animal. When the horse refuses to go, take the front foot at the fetlock and bend the leg at the knee joint. Hold it thus for three minutes and let it down, and the hoise will go. The only way in which I can account for this effective mastery of the horse is that he can think of only one thing at a time, and having made up his mind not to go, my theory is that the bending of the leg takes his mind from the origina? thought. Tliure have been some barbarously cruel methods resorted to to make a baulky horse go its way, such as filling the mouth with sand, severely beating the horse, or, as in the rec nt case, cutting out his tongue. The humane societies would have their hands full to care for all these cruelties to animals. Jf they only knew, the owners of horses would adopt my treatment, and there would be no trouble with the most troublesome baulky horses." The Leeds Mercury, in its angling notes, has the following paragraph :— " Mr F. Whitley, an old Wharfedale angler, now located at Wellington, Now Zealand, sends me this week some interesting items of news concerning the fishing in that country. He says his best basket last season with fly was 20 trout, weighing 331 b, besides nine others given away ; the largest fish Tilb 2oz. His othor best baskets were 24 trout, weighing 2'Jlb ; 20 trout, 231 b ; 24 trout, 21ilb, &c, Arc. Ho concludes his letter by saying, ' So you see we have better fishing here than in the Wharfe. Better ! I should rather think it is ; but, then, I should very much doubt if any country is caymble of producing such splendid trout-fishing as New Zealand ; and it is comparatively a very short time ago since they were introduced over there from Enshnd. The ilies most successful on those rivers are one's dressed on about No. (5 hooks, with claret, orange, and dull-red bodies ; wings from the partridge, grouse, and jay. They aro mostly ribbed with broad gold tinsel.' " There is a story going— l cannot vouch for its truth, it was told me by a Judge - of n man who lay dying. The pastor of the parish, a good aud pious man, came to »it with him, and, thinking to cheer him up, told him an anecdote about a dog. "When the pastor had finished, the sick man sat up and said, "I know n better story than that. I had a dog once, a big, brown, lopsided " The effort had proved too much for his strength. He fell (