NEWS ITEMS OF INTEREST.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9403, 25 March 1909, Page 6

NEWS ITEMS OF INTEREST.

In Wellington Magistrate’s Court the other day, Mr Wilford, who was engaged on a case abont a jibbing horse, said “Mr Justice Deuniston has made use of quotations from ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ therefore I think |1 am justified in quoting Artemus Ward, where he says that a pious man who can drive a jibbing hofse for ten miles and not be put back years in his religion is ripe enough for a better world.” Owing, says to the Press, to the of the Government hiding up the paying and non-paying sections in one general return, as in the case of the Hurunui-Bluff railway, it is almost impossible to find out what any particular seotion is doing, as we have discovered to our cost in connection with the Lyttelton line. We hope Parliament will insist on the Manawatu and other sections being shown separately in the returns, and if this is done we venture to predict that the results will prove the marked superiority of private management of railways as compared with State control. " There is at present growing in a garden in Leith Street, says the Otago Daily Times, a remarkable potato plant, which has been at traoting a good deal of interest. Its exact species has not yet been ascertained, but the seed was one that happened to be selected for planting from a small lot purchased from a grocer. When the exceptionally strong growth of the ehaw was first noticed its owner began to tie and prop it up, with the result that the dozen stalks of which it is composed have now / attained a height of w.ell over Bft.' The potatoes are being carefully kept, and|results next season will be watched with interest. It appears to the uninitiated a very short-sighted policy on the part ofvtbe shipping companies to maintain their passenger fares • between New Plymouth and Onehunga at the old rates, and see tjie traffic driven to the Main Trunk railway (says the Taranaki Herald). Even if the fares were reasonable, which they are not, one would have thought that the companies would make an effort to retain a trade whion must have been a source of great profit. The Northern Company, it Is understood, is willing to reduce fares, but the Union Company, with which there is a working agreement, declines. As a consequence, the steamers are running with many empty berths. Perhaps there is some connection between the Vancouver route negotiations passing between the Union Company and the Government, and the company’s avoidance of keen competition with the Main Trunk railway.