LOCAL AND GENERAL.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15131, 27 January 1917, Page 9

LOCAL AND GENERAL.

During the thunderstorm last week (says the Ashburton Guardian) a whirlwind lifted a shed 10ft by 12ft on Mr W Bellow's property, Westerlield, and carried it over a fence about a chain distant. where the building collapsed. The wind also caught a 10ft gate, together with the post, and shifted them several yards. There was a time, before the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr W M Hughes, btcame known to fame, when lie mended umbrellas in the vicinity of the Sydney wharveg, sold books, and did all sorts of odd jobs. He tells in his own inimitable way how Providence once smiled upon him. He found an old signboard with ‘Locksmith’ 6n it, and hung it outside his modest dwelling in the hope that it would bring him in work of some kind, though a locksmith he was not by any stretch of imagination, A shopman came next day, and wanted his iron safe opened. He had lost his key. Here was a dilemma for William Morris. He went to the shop and examined the safe, not knowing what to do to open it. Should he blast the door with dynamite? While thoughts like this were careering through his Jbrain, and as he was feeling underneath the safe, his hand swept across the missing key. He pocketed it without saying a word, and informed the delighted shopkeeper that he would return in half an hour with a key that would open the obstinate lock. With a few deft flourishes of a file the kev was biightend up. It opened the safe like magic, and the shopkeeper never paid a sum away more willingly than he did the fee to this olever “locksmith.”