RANDOM NOTES

Western Star, 12 October 1926, Page 2

RANDOM NOTES

The death of Mr W Y H Hall, removes the last of the old band of legal practitioners wkq used to appear in the Riverton .Warden’s Court a- quarter of-a-century ago. They and the presiding Magistrates, Messrs McCulloch, Ranson, and Keddell, have passed away to that bourne whence no traveller returns, the only survivors being Mr J W Poynton and Mr S E McCarthy, the fomer” being still in harness at Auckland, and the latter retired at Chritchurch. Three clerks of the court have also joined the -great majority —■ Messrs A M Eyes, M MacFarlane, and E J Ashley. The others of the old band of legal practitioners were Messrs T M Macdonald, John Macalister, White (Dunedin), Adam Anderson, J P O’Reilly, and J Moffet. Many a long and intricate mining case .occupied their attention, and called for a display of their forensic abilitly. Sometimes a hearing would run far into the night when the dingy' courtroom had to be illuminated with flaring and flickering candles, making the reading of documents in bad hand-writing the despair of the bench and the bar. The mining agents who were contemporaneous with the _ above members of the Bar were Messrs J Lyle. J P Young, J Taylor, and J Evans, who subsequent ly became S.M, and was chairman of several important mining commissions. These two,, have , crossed the Great Divide. The late Mr Hall possessed a pleasant personality, and always ready to discuss many non-professional subjects, particularly natural history, and he was one of those who believed that among the native fauna of New Zealand there was an. otter.

<s><s><s> ‘Glorious New Zealand,’ the title of the picture screened in Riverton last Friday was an eye-opener to those who have not travelled far afield. But from a New Zealander’s point of view > it is not above critieisrii. \ Said a patron —‘Well, I didn’t think I lived in a country so much like the Arctic regions.’ He considered there was too. much mountain, snow, and ice. Of course the picture is for. advertising purposes abroad. Large numbers, of the' well-to-do are lovers of wild scenery— l mountains ice-capped, snow clad, flanked with mighty slowly moving, crushing, grinding glaciers. They like the weird in Nature—the wonders .of the thermal region, volcanoes, geysers, boiling springs. They delight in the fiords with their, precipitous _walls, and in lakes embosomed in hills .forest- \ clad from base to summit. ‘Glorious New Zealand’ will appeal .to\ these, and 'it should prove the means of attracting hundreds to our shores; A , New Zealander would have liked to se e more of our rural scenees and the long vistas of bush road fit for m°tor traffic; but, of course, in catering for a special-class, and with a superabundance of scenes to select, from and a limited time in which to show them, such .a selection had to be made as would serve trie purpose in view). The picture'demonstrates . that New Zealand has not only grand and magnificent scenery but that it contains an opitome of the , varied scenery of sub-tropical and temperate zones.

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Trie Otautau School Committee have ' decided to abolish the: system of prizeing at the annual break-up, and devote the money hitherto spent on individual prizes to building up the ' school library, a most laudable object. On this vexed question of prize-giving it is interesting to learn how other countries view it- Take France. Their annual prize-giving is not merely the distribution of books, all hound alike in rather hideous red and gold. It is the fete of the school year, and the French are lost without their fetes. Intensely hard workers, leading on the whole rather sombre lives, they expect and need the fete as a safety .valve.. The prizes are hardly prizes in the English sense of the word. Every child gets one; —that is to say, he receives a little present at the end of the school year with which to celebrate the year’s work. The school child still,, wears a black' or check pinafore lor most of the time, but , hursts out into all the glories of the foilette'on Sundays and Thursdays. School prizes were suppressed during the war, but re d and gold volumes which nobody reads are not likely to disappear from the French habit and custom.. But a school library < should he * preferable to the French system.

<s> <s> <§> It is eleven years this month since the ,execution of Nurse Cavell. In the course of a conversation with a repre? sentative of Les Nouvelles Litteraires, M Poincare has thrown an interesting sidelight on the circumstances surround ing her lamented death. (He said that Baron von der Lancken recently sent him, but too late to be .included m his book, a protest against a passage in which he attributed to- Baron von der Lacken the responsibility/for Miss Oavell’s death, as so many other authors had already done: M. Poincare stated that he had now received from the Marquis de Villalobar a very complete and moving account of the terrible . tragedy of October 1915, ‘and I owe it to truth,’ he added, to say_ .that this note is of a nature to rehabilitate Baron von der Lancken. He had urged General Sauberzweig .not to have Miss Caveall executed, but the general refused to listen to him. The only fault which Baron von der Lancken made was not to have dared to telephone to the Kaiser, who was at Spa, and who it appears regretted the execution of tlie death sentence of which no one had informed him. The recital which I have received from the Marquis de Villalobar, is very impressive and full ot detail. It has convinced me personally that Baron von der Lancken has been calumniated. _ . —DOXA.