THE CHAMPION MEAN MAN.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4253, 29 June 1895, Page 3

THE CHAMPION MEAN MAN.

The editor of the Arrowtown paper professes to have found in his district the champion mean man. He approached him lately, he says, on the subject of subscribing to the local paper, and he answered thus : '.' What do I want to take the paper for when I can borrow it ? " And then the editor gives his opinion that a man who borrows his neighbor's paper is mean enough to dig up his father's grave and remove his shirt. Well, this is hardly a correct illustration of the mean man of our experience. We have one or two of the species in our mind's eye who would shudder at the extravagance of putting their deceased parent under the ground in a shirt or of putting him under the ground at all if they could get the job done at the public expense. There is also the man who will surreptitiously pick his neighbor's paper off the door-step and read it and occasionally forget to put it back ; and there is also the individual who abuses the political opinions of the local paper and the one who pretends that he never reads it because of some ancient injustice. But both of these read it as they never read their Bible, and their digestive apparatus never fairly begins to go of a morning until they have borrowed of pirated it in some form.