NOTES FROM TAKAKA.

Colonist, Volume XII, Issue 1169, 8 December 1868, Page 3

NOTES FROM TAKAKA.

[from a correspondent.]

" Nothing in the Papers" often affords a theme for the sage reflect ions of one of the pleasantest scribblers of the C lllustrated London News ; but " nothing in Takaka" I am afraid is too much of a pro-aie truth to allow even the most exuberant imagination an opportunity for remark, except Old Euclid's axiom " take nothing from nothing and nothing remains." A week ago and every heart throbbed big with " the new rush." " Are you going to the diggings ?" was your morning salutation. "What's tho news ?" was demanded with an earnestness which would have caused the most religious to desire a similar fervency in their favorite hymn. " Room for a thousand men !" made farmers chuckle and scan with loving eye their broad potato fields, and give an extra hitch to their waistbands as they counted their fattening bceve3, and poured a greater allowance of butter-milk into the pig trough. "Thirty ounces of gold!" pondered the storekeeper and publican ; and what a wild phantasmagoria of the " digger tribe" danced across their teeming imaginations, as they repeated again and again ''Thirty ounces of gold!" But " "Twas ever thus, &c," I need not quote in full ; a change has come o'er tho spirit of our dream, and nature's eternal barriers, snow-covered and precipitous, damp the ardor of even the most sanguine amongst us. Had the road now projected to the Upper Anatoki been completed, and were the diggings eventually to deserve the title of the " New Rush," it would have been a bright day for Taknka. At present, however, hope is all wehave to feed upon, and the universal conviction that " Gold is there," and in quantity to reward the diligent. Since the advent of Mr. Collins, our M.H.R., we have had nothing to stir the stagnation which appeai'3 to be chronic in Golden Bay, except " Mr. Douglass" ; and if any one could succeed, I must say he appears to be ■pre-eminently fitted for the job, but I am afraid he is too mu;h inclined to forget "Charity." When respectable publicans and storekeepers are branded a3 blood-thirsty, &c, in a vocabulary of terms which would silence Billingsgate, and when aged arid

respectable men are termed "hoary-headed oldsinners" for indulging in that antipathy of King James's, usually termed a pipe, (I would be afra:d to designate according to Mr. Douglass,) it certainly justifies the observation I heard one of the ■worthiest and most Christian ladies in the valley make: —" It may bo true, and I daresay in some cases is, but such language does not appear very Christian-like, and I am afraid is not calculated to have the effect intended." Fanaticism is generally attributed to the ignorant and uneducated, and in a small religious community 'ike ours, however we may differ in our religious faith, it becomes extremely painful for one neighbor to sit and hear his next door neighbor and friend scurrilously abused to his face, under the license which the respect all men pay to the House of God gives to those who profess to preach the Gospel. We would require a little of Murphy's cure I think applied in such oases. I will forward the fir?t big news of " the rush," but at present would advise Nelsonians to " bide a wee."