PARS ABOUT PEOPLE

Observer, Volume XVIII, Issue 1024, 13 August 1898, Page 6

PARS ABOUT PEOPLE

So Mr J. M. Brigham is to be sent to England to complete the negotiations in connection with equipping the Calliope Dock bo well carried on by Mr Witheford up till the present time, and also to arrange for the conversion of our harbour loans. The Board could not have done better. Mr Brigham is a shrewd man of business, he has the history and the affairs of the Harbour Board at his fingers' ends, and so long as he does not overawe the Lords of the Admiralty by his powerful personality, the results of his mission ought to be profitable to the Harbour Board.

Miss Scott, late Inspector of Factories, now Mrs Hawthorn, showed a faculty that is popularly supposed to be rare with her sex, by keeping the fact of her marriage from the knowledge of the department till six or seven weeks after the event. But somehow it leaked out, when she was called on to resign. Exactly why, it isn't easy to see. For unless there is some special disability, she should be as capable of inspecting factories now as she ever was. Perhaps, however, there is something in the point urged that as her husband keeps a Bbop, she would not be without bias on the factory question.

Ben Tillett put a final shot into Dick Seddon and the Government before hia departure for England. Sen reckoned it was treachery for the Government to abandon the universal franchise principle in the Municipal Franchise Bill. They were giving away the rights of the people, he said, and this waa a most contemptible thing. But say, Ben, when did the people possess these rights that the Government are accused of giving away ? -

One of the passengers by the Waikare waa Mr W. F. Young, the well-known basa singer of Dunedin. An endeavour was made to induce Mr Young to remain in Auckland for a fortnight and appear at a series of fonr 'chamber concerts,' but he could not. It is probable that Auckland may yet have an opportunity afforded them of hearing one of the most finished and popular singers of the colony. It ia gratifying to Mr J. Park that his lecture on ' The Geology of the Hauraki Peninsula ' is thought so much of at Home. A discourse on 'the geology of the Moanatairi' would be much more interesting to many Aucklanders. Major Curtis, the genial manager of the Dante Legerdemain Company, now in the South, is a bit of a celebrity in tbe Land of the Stars and Stripes, having run successful tours for fifteen or sixteen years on one play, entitled ' Sam'l o' Posen.' Another thing that makes the Major an object of curiosity in these law-abiding lands is the fact that he is a standing illustration of the life that Bret Harte has depicted in the goldfields of the Wild West, where a man's life often depends on his quickness of eye and smartness in whipping out a pistol. It is said that he has on more than one occasion pinked his man, but each time it has been proved that he acted in self-defence, and that it has been a question whether he or ' the other fellow ' was the smarter.