LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 17935, 31 July 1920, Page 4

LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Mr. Justice Herdman’s residence at Papanui road, Christchurch, is to be purchased for £5OOO for a soldiers’ home. It was stated at the annual meeting of the Levin Dairy Company yesterday that the sum of £78,000 had been distributed among the suppliers last season. General and Lady Birdwood and Mr Gavin Hamilton (late private secretary to the Earl of Liverpool) left for England, via Panama, by the Argyllshire on Wednesday. Great building acivity is going on in Hamilton at present, and it is announced that over 200 residences are in course of erection. In 1018-19 the numbers of permits issued totalled 119 and represented a sum of £172,462. Spurious shilling, two-shilling, and half-crown pieces have been put in circulation in Wellington, as well as a number of silvered penny pieces. Persons would be well advised to examine silver coins coming into their possession. At the Police Court at Palmerston North, John Joseph AUingham, a taxi-driver, was committed tdT trial on a charge of breaking and entering a warehouse at Longburn and [stealing a motor car tyre and eight cases of benzine, the property of the Kairangu Dairy Company. At present linseed is grown in New Zealand and exported to Australia, the products In the shape of oil and cake being shipped back. In 1918 linseed worth £14,690 was sent away and products valued at £31,000 imported. The North Canterbury farmer§ are talking of establishing a mill to deal with linseed in this country. The itinerary of Mr Justice Borst, of the United States Supreme Court, who .is due in Wellington on August 9 from Australia, in the course of a tour w’hich he is making in the ■capacity of Grand Sire of American Oddfellowship, has been slightly altered. His Honour finds that he will not be able to pay the projected visit to Palmerston North and Feilding, as it is necessary for him to leave for the south on the evening of August 10. The Judge proposes to pay a visit to Rotorua as well as Auckland, and will pass through Wellington on August 20' on his way to the north.

“I am unable to understand why some manufacturers of summer drinks colour beverages made from lemons, yellow. A lemon, except the skin, is not yellow in colour, and no one has seen one’ that was.”—Mr Andrews, Government analyst, at the meeting of the Wellington Philosophical Society. In the course of the same address he said: “When a person buys smoked fish it is only natural to assume that the colour is due to the process of smoking, but such is not always the case. 1 bought some smoked hake which upon being analysed was found to contain sufficient coal tar dye to dye a pound of wool.” The nation has reverted to 2d letters—a method of taxation which will raise a really surprising amount of revenue states the London Daily Mail." The postage figures of- big London firms, for instance, are astonishing. One wholesale company buys £125,000 worth of postage stamps in a year, and one of the big stores estimates that the extra id per letter will mean an Increase of £25,000 in its annual expenditure on stamps. Incidentally we have become a great i letter-writing nation. When Queen I Victoria ascended the throne the yearly average number of letters delivered to each person in the United Kingdom, was three, but in 1914 this had increased to seventy-four. And there has, of course, been a further increase during the war. An extraordinary religious movement has (says an exchange) for some months been takiiig place amongst the Maoris of Taranaki. A native named Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana has been preaching and practising faith healing. Five hundred people profess to have been cured “by the power of God and belief in His name.” Ratana seems to have studied his Bible and given it a literal rendering. His creed is the creed of almost any Christian church, adding to it the conviction that “faith in God” also cures diseases. He warns his followers against “tohungas and their system," and proclaims Christ’s message of “a new birth.” He intends visiting the Hawke’s Bay pas and then goes on to Gisborne and probably the Waikato.