ENTERTAINMENT AT TAURANGA.

Observer, Volume 7, Issue 348, 8 August 1885, Page 6

ENTERTAINMENT AT TAURANGA.

A correspondent sends us a long account of 'An Evening With Longfellow,' a musical and elocutionary entertainment recently held at Tauranga. Space will not permit us to publish the report in extenss; it must suffice to say that the committee was composed of Messrs Buddie, Wright, Butt, and Paget, who earned golden opinions for the way in which they carried out the arrangements in connection with the affair. Mesdames Daniel, Buddie, McCandlish, the Misses Clarke, Lundon, Buckland, and Clayton (of Parnell), and Messrs Vogan,' Macauley, Paget, Buddie, Jones, and Mulgan, and' Master E. Clarke contributed to the long and varied programme, which was exclusively composed of selections from the writings of America's great bard. The entertainment appears to have been an unqualified success.

The Archduchess Maria Theresa, of Austria, is learning to make jewellery in the shop of a Tyrolese worker in gold and silver. Among recent carnival festivities at Vienna, 'A Beggars' Ball' carried off the palm for eccentricity. The guests were got up as theives and rascals of the lowest type — pickpockets, coiners, defaulting cashiers, armed burglars, &c, &c. The ladies wore the costumes of petroleuses, chiffonieres, and the like. One of the most amusing representations was a group of men quarrelling violently. Their faces were scratched and bleeding — a parody on the lively scenes in the Crotian Parliament. Prizes were distributed for the best-dressed and best-sustained characters, and the first prize was won by a lady whose toilet bristled with small revolvers. The great fault in most English drawingrooms is the stiffness and mathematical correctness of all the arrangements. Ido not of course allude to pictures, which must be hung in proper line ; but with regard to drapery, such as curtains and hangings, a little boldness and disregard to conventionality makes a great difference. I have seen one or two rooms where the curtains round the fireplace, the valances over the windows and round the looking-glasses, instead of being carefully parted in the centre and looped up accordiug to established rule, have apparently been put up anyhow. The general effect is both novel and pleasing.

Commenting on the decollete dressing of the titled dames who attended the last Drawingroom, a London paper says : — ' The noses of the poor little debutantes were nipped into redness by the prevailing chilliness, provoking many an idle jest from the sightseers who passed from carriage to carriage, peering in to feast their eyes on flowers, furbelows and flesh. As usual there was plenty of each to seen, for most of the women, vain of their finery, and glorying in their semi-nudity, deliberately invited inspection by using no wraps whatever. If a burlesque actress was asked to exhibit her bare neck, shoulders, bust, and arms from a carriage to a crowd of clawing women and sniggering men, she would indignantly refuse ; but our English aristocracy are not so prudish. Ihey lengthen their skirts, certainly, but only with what they rob from their bodices, and they appear clothed down to their waist in little else but the virtue which they inherit with their blue blood, their blushes being only of the kind that the rouge-pot supplies or the wintry air locates on their noses.'