The Western Star. (PUBLISHED BI-WEEKLY.) WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1881.

Western Star, Issue 429, 23 March 1881, Page 2

The Western Star. (PUBLISHED 81-WEEKLY.) WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1881.

We noticed a few days ago that several fairly rich specimens were shown us from the Pioneer claim, Longwood, and that a quantity of even more valuable stone had been taken to Invercargill by shareholders who had been visiting the claim. On being burnt and broken up into pieces in size about half an inch, the stone picked up by Mr Douglas was jproved to contain gold throughout, while patches of gold of more or less richness were found' on nearly every small piece of stone. The reef where the specimens were taken •from is nearly two.feet wideband there are ‘.hundreds of tons of stone visible. As soon as the bridge is erected oyer the Purakinc, a jcpuple of tons of stone will be put- through jthe public test battery at Riverton.

[ The weather .during the past ten days has "been very unseasonable, and has been the ‘means of suspending harvest operations—in many cases at a critical time. Strong cold winds and heavy rainfalls have been the rule, and on Monday morning a gale of unusual yiolonce raged, which had not quite exhausted itself up to the hour of going to press this morning. We have not heard of any specific damage having been done by the gale, but in a general way the effect must have been injurious to over ripe crops of grain still uncut) While the thorough soaking imparted to stacks which, in anticipation of an early threshing, were not particularly well protected, will necessitate their being pulled down to allow the grain to become dry again. A considerable qantity of grain—principally wheat—still remains to be cut, but given good harvest Weather that operation should be completed .with this month. Tenders are called for permanent way of contract No. 1, Olautau-Nightcaps railway.

Major Atkinson addressed bis constituents at Patea on Monday evening, and at the conclusion of his address was awarded a vote of confidence. Messrs Hursthouse (Nelson) and Shrimski (Oamaru) also addressed their constituents at . Waimea West and Oamaru respectively, on Saturday evening, and received votes of confidence.

The man named Jennings referred to in our last issue as having been fined 5s for being drunk and disorderly oh St. Patrick’s Day, was but a few hours cleared from custody when ho again had to be run in. On being brought before T. Daniel, Esq., J.P., on Saturday morning, Constable Buchanan staled that there was only a thin wooden partition between the lock-up and his private apartments, and during the whole of Friday night prisoner had made use of foul and disgusting language, to the great annoyance of himself and family. His Worship inflicted a fine of £3, or one month’s imprisonment, and promised to represent to the proper authorities tbe condition of the constable’s residence adjoining the lock-up, with a view to an alteration.

The selection of an assistant master for the Riverton school —nice Mr Mahoney, who has been appointed first assistant to .the Milton District Higli School—having been left in the hands of Mr Inspector Goyen, that gentleman reports that he has secured the services of Mr Sebow, of Ballarat, who will be able to enfer upon his duties about the beginning of the month.

We have to acknowledge receipt from the Exhibition authorities of volumes 1 and 2 of the Official Catalogue of Exhibits of the Melbourne Exhibition. Basides a complete list of exhibits, the Catalogue contains a large amount of valuable information relative to the countries which have forwarded exhibits.

On Saturday last the Right Rev. Bishop Moran visited Riverton and held a confirmation service in St. Columbkille Church. The rev. gentleman’s stay did not extend over two hours, his many engagements prior to hi B departure for home precluding a longer visit.

Wo learn from the broker, Mi-.J. Lyle, that there, is every probability that the Walcapatu Sludge Channel Company will be floated. The Chinese at Round Hill, who have extensive miring interests there, arid who | are keenly alive to the advantages which a sludge channel would confer, are applying for a large number of shares—indeed, there seems a probability that the bulk of the property will be held by celestials. The Gazette of lOth insfc. contains a proclamation under the hand of tho Governor setting apart for railway purposes the following sections of land in the township of Riverton Extension : 1,2, 3,4, 5,6, 7, and 8, Block Vl.'; 2*lß. J', 17, 18, 16, and 20, Block Y.; 1,2, 3,4, 5, 11, 20, 21, and 22, Black IV.; 16, 17,18,19, 20, 21, 22, and 23, Block III.; and i, 2,3, 4,5, 14, 15, 16. 17, 18, and 26, Block 11. ■ ...... - ( - -

The Inangahua Times says : —At the recent, half-yearly meeting of shareholders in the Welcome company, some interesting facts were given in relation to the operations of the Company. The total value of gold produced by the mine up to February Bth last, was £65,395. 6s sd, of which, £32,259, or considerably : river' £2 per share) was paid in dividends. The cost of erecting the new crushing plant and driving the low level has been cleared, off within a small sum, and from the'proceeds of the next cleaning-up a dividend wil probably be declared, and the C.om. pany start out with a clean sheet, There is certainly no mine in New Zealand at the present t me which can figure up alongside the Welcome.” rf Mr E. M. Clissold writes to:the LLyttston Times’: — : ‘T visited Wanganui about, four years ago, and was impressed with two things; first s frith-.the eight-of -an: elegant, barouche fit for use in Hyde Park, next, with the presence of some 400 or 500 Natives, who swarmed through the streets. Although the London barouche seemed out of place in, the ill-paved streets of Wanganui, yet a Maori, woman dressed in the'extreme of fashion, slightly intoxicated, carrying a small snekirig pig on her back, which she every now and again addressed in soothing. tvYrds, made, mo rub my head to convince myself that _I was not dreaming. The inns were crammed: with Maoris—the parlors, bar-rooms, bedrooms, pavement of the streets, stables—all were full, of them., They were all declining not" drink,' but the verb to drink —in every mood. When 1 inquired where the* money came from to enable them to get drunk, I was told that the Government had lately paid them a considerable sum for land. Nobody seemed surprised. The surprise would have been felt if they had not. spent the.money in.drink yet,.to, one unaccustomed to the sight, it was sufficiently disgusting.

In Canada and'in the United States the sale of 1 liquor; to Natives is most strictly •iprohibited t and, although in both countries the law .is constantly evaded, yet in neither country is the evil so glaring as it is in the North Island. It would be a very good thing if we could, in some such way, spill all the liquor sold to the Natives in the North Island, when there would, ho doubt, bo a great deal of bad liquor lost, and fine men and women saved.” , , , The new Catholic .Church at Winton was opened on Sunday last by Bishop Mcran, who was assisted in the ceremony, by the Rev.', Father Kehoe. 1 '

Henry Anderson, journalist, threw himself off the wharf at- Wellington onTMhnclay morning. He was rescued with difficulty in. an exhausted state, and taken to the Hospital. He bad’been in depressed spirits for some time.

William Forster, aged eight years, died in the Dunedin Hospital from a kick by a horse, causing fracture of the- skull. He was playing in a paddock at Forbury, and flipping the horse with a switch, when it struck out. It is rumoured in Dunedin that intelligence has been received' that .Mr J. F. Jones, of the Grand Pacific Hotel, reported to have committed suicide at the Ocean Beach. a month ago, has been seen in Melbourne. The Wellington correspondent of the " Otago Daily Times” has been furnished by the property tax officers with a return, made up from telegrams Monday.afternoon, of the amounts received opto Monday morning on account of that tax, the total to date being £124,419. It is believed that nearly as much more has still to come in, although it is doubtful whether it will.all be collected by the close of the month.- Still-the second moiety is not due till the 22nd inst., and it is clear that there must be some large sums yet to come, from Otago particularly, which continues to hold third place, following Canterbury and Wellington. It may be doubted whether more than £200,000 in all will be, got in by the end of the month, when the financial year ends, but every effort will bo used to collect as much as possible. The returns up to today were as follow : Auckland district, £21,182 j Hawke’s Bay, £7876; Wellington, £23,428 ; Nelson, £4880; Canterbury, £33,811 ; Waitaki, £5978 ; Otago, £ /3,054; Southland, £4340 • total, £124,449. ' On Friday might, as a hotelkeeper named James Campbell was riding in from the racecourse at Oaraaru, be lost control over his horse and was . thrown off. He fall on his head, causing fracture of the skull, and died the following day. : On Saturday next, at Sloan’s Theatre, Invercargill, G. F. Martin will offer for sale by auction 2400 acres of that famous Gladfield estate, Oreti Plains, the property of J. Mackintosh! Esq. The block’ has been divided into farms varying in size from 62 to 73 acres’each, and the terms are extraordinarily liberal, viz., the whole of the purchase money to remain on the farms for five years, subject to interest of six per cent, payable halfyearly in advance. It is unnecessary to refer to the quality of the land further than to say that it cannot bo excelled in Southland, and any one in'doubt upon this point will do well to inspect the magnificent crops now being taken therefrom.

An illustration of the benefits of life assurance was afforded in the case of the late Mr James Ryan, the station master of tbe Kumnra station of (he Greymouth and Kumara Tramway. It appears that soma three weeks since he saw Mr Campbell, the canvassing agent of the Australian Mutual Provident Institution in Kumara, and intimated his intention of insuring his life in the above institution. His life being accepted —the first deposit was paid on the Friday preceding his death, and the receipt sent up from Greymouth on Saturday. When he died on Tuesday the letter containing tho receipt was found unopened. Tho company has intimated its intention of paying tho policy forthwith.

Entries for The Christchurch ewe and ram fair closed on 18th inst. Over 1600 entries were received, and the affair promises to be a great success. Ah Foo, Chinese cook of the barque Mabel, was fined £9 at the Police Court, Lyttelton, ■on 19lh inst.,'.for attempting to smuggle four boxes of cigars. . . . • A learped physician finds that the figure on the crucifix in Burgos Cathedral is a human body in a perfect state of preservation. It is said to haye been there since the eleventh century. ■' > :

Just now a most interesting sightis.to.be seen in the western sky soon after sunset, the Three planets—Yenus, Jupiter, and Saturn forming an almost equilateral triangle, the two former as the west and east feet, and the ’latter as the apex. Yenus, although past its greatest elongation, and by far the brightest of the three, will not attain its greatest brilliancy until the 27th instant. To the west of Jupiter, and near the horizon, lies Mercury, and a few degrees above Saturn is to be found Neptune;-but both of these are unfavorable for observation, the former being in the yellow light of the sun, and the latter, tho most remote planet, being distant about three thousand millions of miles, and appearing as a star of the eighth magnitude is not distinguishable ‘from the fixed stars without very high Telescope power. This makes five planets in The western sky, and as Mars sets not long before the sun, six out of seven are in one quarter of the heavens, the remaining one— TTranus —being just out in opposition. On the 22nd April, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Sun will be in conjunction—or, in other words, they and the. earth will be in a line.—‘Taranaki Herald.’

A strange and fatal accident happened to a child’ named Christina Corridon at Ballarat recently. About,noon she seemed to ■have become thirsty, and following the example of other children endeavored to get a drink of water by putting the water-tap in the back yard.of . her parents’ residence in her mouth. This child seemed to have got totho tap by putting bricks on the ground on which ;to stand, and, unpereeived, to have got the tap fastened in her throat. When she was ’discovered she ,w/is all but suffocated; and,considerable difficulty was experienced in releasing Tier. ‘As soon as this was'effected she Iwas taken to tho Hospital, but she died before iroaebing the institution. -

I The London “Examiner” tells of the insanity of Mr" Cross,* Greorge Eliot’s second husband, of which no'previous public mention has been made. •It says : It seems little more' than a year,, since we lost G-eorgo Henry Lewis, her first and most trusted counsellor and companion, and hardly a twelvemonth since the’world learned with, perhaps, soma degree of surprise, that she had married a 'gentleman of the "Stock .Exchange named 'Cross. While they were on their wedding trip—it is no use to conceal the sad facts — he lost control over himself at Venice, and threw himself from the balcony of their resi-, denco. Happily the sea and not the grounddeceived him, and he survived, but only to be placed ih a maison de sante. Bravely Mrs Cross set herself to face her now doubly lonely life, but the struggle, not surpassed in intensity by that of any of her heroines, did pot last long, and she has now gone, at the age of 60, to the rest that must have come to jier as' a, relief.” ‘ j A commission agent named William Spain committed suicide at 0.-imam by hanging himself on Sunday morning. The deceased, partially dressed only, left his room about four o’clock in the morning, and did not return. About seven o’clock a lad in the employ of Mr A. C. Paterson went to milk his cows, and missing.a leg rone ho went to the stable to I,bpk for it. There he saw Spain hanging from a peg in the wall barely six feet from the ground, his knees being bent and his feet dragging oh the ground. Ho at once gave information to Mrs Spain. The body ysas cut down, and'Dr Fleming summoned, but life was extinct. Deceased had been in a, despondent state of mind for some time past and it is believed diet financial difficulties led to the commission of the rash act.. At the inquest on Monday the jury returned a verdict of temporary insanity.

The “ Tnangahua Times” reports an occur-rence-that almost rivals Tam o’ Shanter’s experience in Alio way Kirk T arc! :—“ A most extraordinary occurrence,” says the journal named, “is reported to us as having occurred at Soldier’s, near Keefton. It appears that on Sunday evening last, two men named Brown and Gibson were returning homo from Reefton to their hut in Soldier’s Gully, and when about half a mile from the Grey road they saw ahead of them what at first appeared to be a small shrub on fire. As they approached it, however, it assumed the appearance of a ball of bluish fire passing slowly over the bush at a height of five or six feet from the ground. As the luminous appearance passed the travellers, one of them, Gibson, was struck by the body on the side of the head with such violence as to render the man almost insensible, and the light then vanished. The sufferer managed to crawl homo, but for some hours was in such agony that his mate was several times on the point of leaving for medical assistance. In the course of the night, however, the man recovered. Strange to say that no mark of any kind was caused by the contact.”

It appears that the Heathen Chinee is not beyond ghostly influences from the spirit world. A respected citizen of Arrowtown, lately deceased, was the owner of some property in the outskirts of the town, which he rented as a garden to a Chinaman. The deceased, while in life, being of an active disposition, would often visit his Celestial tenant* dig a little in the garden, feed the pigs, and perform often small offices. Exactly after death, and at “ the witching hour of night, when churchyards, &o,” and when the Celestial cabbage grower was viewing his flourishing crop, and seeing that all was safe from the depredation of stray goats and cows, there appeared a vision in the shape of his departed , landlord,' working among the potatoes beds, and clad in apropriate grave costume. The Heathen Chineo watched for some time, and then addressed himself (keeping at a respectful distance) to his late landlord, who deigned not an answer, bub deliberately walked up to the pig-stye and threw something in ; then he viewed an apple tree, which since his death, had been very much denuded of its fruit; then seizing hold of a spade, the ghost appeared to dig a hole in the ground, and afterwards disappear down it. The frightened Chinese gardener cleared out, returning at early morning with two other Chinamen to keep him company, the two being preserved from further harm by sundry gaudy pieces of paper, bearing Chinese characters printed upon them, pasted on the outside of their tent

A meeting »f settlers in the Groper’s and Gumrnie’s Bush districts was held in the schoolhouse, Groper’s Bush, on Monday evening, for the purpose of discussing the formation of the proposed Farmers’ Co-operative Association. Mr D. Reidie occupied the chair, and there was a large attendance. The meeting was in favor of the proposal. An account of the proceedings will appear in Saturday’s issue.

The Committee have, been notified that the books ordered for the Groper’s Bush library left Glasgow on 16th January last, in the Otago. The following have been chosen from the Riverton and Orepuki Cricket Clubs as the combined team to play the first eleven of the Invercargill 0. C. at tho latter place on Saturday next: —Mills, Hirst, Woodward, Cosgrove, Reyling, J. Barry, Pattison, Wilson, Howell, H. Barry, Weeden, and Booth. We have been requested to draw the attention of those ratepayers in the Aparima Road District, who have not yet paid'their rates to the necessity of their doing so before the end of the month. The financial year ends on that date, and if any subsidy is voted, the sum payable will be upon the amount of rates collected up to end of March. Ratepayers will therefore not only probably confer an advantage upon themselves by prompt payment, but will thereby facilitate the administrationof the Board’s affairs.

A sculling match of some interest will take place on Saturday next between W. Boniface and R. Harrington, for £lO. The boats to be used are tho Anna and tho Kate ; tho course, from the bridge to the Narrows and back; the winner to be decided by tho victor in two heats, the competitors to exchange boats for the second heat. These conditions are stringent enough to ensure that the “ best man” will receive the stakes. As an additional item of interest in connection with the match, a sum of £4 has been collected for the purchase of a medal or belt, which tho winner of the match referred to will be entitled to hold on the following conditions ; —That the holder of the belt accept any challenge from all comers for tho period of two years; a challenge to be accompanied by a deposit of £lO, the holder of tho belt to lodge a similar amount, and give up the belt if defeated; the holder of the belt to have the option of appointing the date of match, such day to be within three months ©f date of challenge. The course in such matches to he from the bridge round the rocks at the Narrows. Any person holding the belt for two years on these conditions is entitled to claim it as his private property. The first parade in the new drill-shod of the Riverton Rifles took place on Monday evening, under Capt. Hirst. The evening for drill has been altered to Monday, as formerly.

Another important stage has been reached in the progress of the township of Thornbury The National Bank intend opening a branch there on Saturday afternoon.

A special meeting of the Town Council was held last evening, at which the Mayor, orß Chapman, Myers, and Looko were present. The object of the meeting was to enable the Council by special order to sell part of old road lino fronting allotments 4 and 5, section 3, block 1, South Eiverton. A motion to that effect was put and carried, the meeting to confirm same to be held in four weeks from date.

\ A maliciously-disposed correspondent wrote this to the “TariaakLHerald” quite recently: — “ Sir, —I see m a letter in your issue of Saturday, signed ‘Querist,’ what appears to be a (jactation, namely, ‘ Ne suior ultra cepidan.' Can yon inform your readers the meaning of this, and the language to which it belongs ? I am, &0., Inquieeb.” The editor is by no means nonplussed by this epistle, but cheerfully replies in the following lefresiling little foot-note: —“We do not hold ourselves responsible for the opinions of our correspondents, nor the language in which they express themselves. Our duty is to ‘ follow copy,’ ”

\ The Sydney “ Echo” tells the following story: —“ A man went into a Sydney oyster saloon the other evening, called for a plate of oysters, and having eaten them, asked how much there was to pay. ‘A shilling,’ was the reply; whereupon the customer asked for another dozen, and went on ordering and eating until he had finished five plates of bivalves. Then he calmly informed the landlord, that he had no money, and in response to a little abuse, which was natural enough, he added, “ Oysters should not be more than sixpence a plate. I came in here prepared to pay for what I ordered, but when you at once put it out of my power to be honest, and I knew that - the law would have something to say in the matter, I was determined the law should have a case worth raking. Had I been hungry as usual I should have eaten ten plates,’ This peculiar logic so staggered the landlord that when his customer frowned sternly at him and walked out he could make no attempt to stop him.” ...