SESSION AND SOCIETY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue V, 3 August 1895, Page 139

SESSION AND SOCIETY.

CHIT-CHAT FROM THE CAPITAL. (by our parliamentary flaneur.) From Shakespeare down to Robert Louis Stevenson and the author of * The Honour of Savelli,’ English masters of romance have loved to depict the daring heroine who seeks adventure dressed in man’s clothes. That such a character is not a -baseless figment of the imagination the annals of times prove. Women have worked as sailors ana served as soldiers, and have fought and bled for their country. A woman dressed in male attire has captained a merchant vessel ere now—an occupation about the most unfeminine that one could readily imagine. It has been left to Wellington, however, to unearth this week a female bricklayer. The labour is not romantic, nor would one fancy it to be attractive to even the most distressed and destitute dame or damsel. Nevertheless, a woman has been found working as a bricklayer in man’s clothes, and what is more, making a living thereat. Stranger still to relate, she is young, modest, and by no means ill-favoured. Indeed, she might well pass for a nicelooking lad not yet out of his teens. Unpoetic as the handling of bricks is, the series of events which led up to this heroine taking to brick-laying was by no means without a flavour of romance, or at any rate tragedy. Her story is that she was deceived by a plausible rascal into entering into a marriage with him, which was bigamous on his part, and that she lived as his wife for a while in Auckland. Deserted and destitute, she took to the above extreme method of gaining a livelihood. Her rescue therefrom last week was the work of the Salvation Army. I wonder how many strange stories the agents of this energetic organization could tell, if they cared to translate their experiences into narrative form I

Wellington, like the rest of the world, has gone mad over golf. I say ‘ mad ’ advisedly, for the insanity leads people to trulge miles out to Miramar, or journey to the Hutt. Though last Saturday was a ghastly day, such as only Wellington can produce in perfection, with cold blustering squalls from the South every hour, the Governor was dragged from his warm fireside to open the new links at Miramar. All the golf-mad folk assembled to see the deed done in the driving rain and bitter wind. Then they proceeded to enjoy themselves immensely by playing sundry games of golf in the morass which had just been declared by the vice-regal lips to be ‘ links.’ Everyone appeared to be vastly satisfied with the day’s amusement, and declared that when there shall be a dry winter, the said links will be extremely good. The Hutt folk, possessors of rival links be it remembered, shake their heads over these prophecies, and say that, first, that there never will be a dry winter, and, second, that if there were, Miramar (which I may define as.a place between the city and Cook’s Strait), is too far out to be of any use.

One Professor Loisette has been spending a few days amongst us practising the art of improving the memory. One or two pupils of his whom I met spoke well of the result of his lessons. I did not myself take advantage of the Professor’s instructions. Personally, I find that my chief trouble in life is not in the inability to remember, but the inability to forget. I have often envied in other men the magnificent capacity to forget uncomfortable incidents, to say nothing of emphatic promises and assurances. In the same way when Mr Edison devotes his marvellous genius to inventing and improving machines that enable us to hear the human voice at immense distances, it has often struck me that a far more valuable invention would be a handy instrument for enabling us not to hear what we would rather be deaf to. Believe me, deaf people with short memories are not so greatly to be pitied as some of us imagine. During session time at Wellington especially, it has often struck me that the politician who is obliged to listen and cannot forget must be a depressed and harassed man. Possibly he envies one Thomas Taylor, just now an inmate of a destitute asylum in New South Wales, who, I see, gives out that he has entirely lost his memory and can remember nothing except that he formerly lived in New Zealand. Once or twice in the course of my life, I have met extraordinary examples of genuine lapses of memory due to physical causes. I once travelled on the box seat of a coach through one of the most beautiful mountain passes to be found on the surface of the globe. A fellow traveller astonished me by telling me that he had been through the pass before, and had absolutely not the faintest recollection of any of its features. The explanation of this was that at the farther end of the journey he had been involved in a bad coach accident, had been stunned, and suffered from concussion of the brain. The result was that his mind was an absolute blank to every incident of his life for weeks

previous to the accident. He lived in hopes of this dark spot on his memory’s page being lighted up, but when I last heard of him the illumination had not taken place. Though the political air has been pretty warm in Wellington for the last fortnight, it seems to have been much more electrically charged both in New South Wales and in England. I have been taking some especial interest in the Reid-Parkes duel in Sydney, because in other days and when across the sea, I had the pleasure of knowing both these noted politicians. To me, it seems a mistake that two prominent leading men should be pitted against one another in a combat which must result in the exclusion of one or the other from public life, and though I do not say that Sir Henry Parkes’ recent political aberrations entitled him to much sympathy, one regrets to see a famous octogenarian humiliated and beaten in the evening of his life. Especially must his defeat be crushing to him, coming as it does within a few days of the death of his kind-hearted and devoted wife. In appearance, no two men could be much more more unlike than the conquering Reid and the broken Parkes. Sir Henry is tall and gaunt; the Premier short and rotund. Sir Henry’s bushy hair is snowy white ; what hair Mr Reid has is of the rufus order. But these two totally dissimilar men have one peculiarity in common. Both have high-pitched, piping, falsetto voices, which interfere very much with the effect of their oratory, at any rate until one grows accustomed to them.

To pass from New South Wales to England, I see that Mr Jeoffrey Drage, the Secretary of the English Labour Commission, beat no less an antagonist than Sir William Harcourt at Derby. Mr Drage is known to some people as the author of a novel called ‘ Cyril,’ which I conscientiously refrain from recommending to your readers. Those who met Mr Drage when he was travelling through New Zealand and studying the labour question here some five or six years ago, must admit that he was not nearly so stupid as his book. He still takesan interest in New Zealand, I believe. An amusing incident of the English elections has reminded me of one of the best of our New Zealand political stories. The English episode to which I refer is the exhibition offered by Lord Kimberley’s son, Lord Wodehouse, in hauling a Unionist chairman off his seat and offering to fight him for /'5O. On one occasion in New Zealand in Otago the conditions were reversed. The chairman of a local Council had, it was alleged, certified improperly to certain public accounts. At the next meeting of the Council he was taken to task, and one of the councillors moved that he resign. The accused chairman quietly beckoned his chief assailant to step up to the chair, and the unsuspecting councillor complying with the invitation, the chairman promptly rose and floored him with a terrific right and letter. Glaring at the astounded and horrified circle round the official table, the irate president then demanded whether any gentleman would second the motion. He was much the biggest man present, and naturally no one did second it. Then said the Chairman : ‘As the motion is not seconded it lapses. We will now proceed to the business on the order paper.’ Most habitues of Parliament say they are glad Auckland is sending Mr Thomas Thompson back to the House. For my part lam unfeignedly sorry that we are not to have another chance of hearing and seeing the galvanic oratory and far-reaching, arm-sweeping, paperbrandishing action of Mr Monk. The arousing Monkish harangues used to be to many gallery-sitters a source of whole-souled and genuine delight. We used to watch him

‘ When head.and arms and coat-tails were brought w lily 'nto play As the metaphoric torrent swept him bodily away.’

Mr Thompson may be shrewd, and industrious, and experienced, and all that, but who ever saw him in the transports of eloquence wave one arm above his head, while with the other he unconsciously swept away a glass of water from the desk in front of him, and sent its contents flying around among his fellow members ? I once saw Mr Monk do that. Alas I lam not to see him do it again.