Notes.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 17, 25 April 1901, Page 17

Notes.

Two Woodcjates. The following paragraph appeared a few days ago in the news columns of a Dunedin daily : ' On the banns of marriage for three couples being publibhed at the little church of Acton in Suffolk, it was discovered that every one of the six persons conoerned was named Woodgate.' The paragraph inspired our office-poet to take down his long-diaused harp from ita nail, dust its cobwebs off, and sing the following strain :—: — ' Two Wood-gates, thus, are now made one, Together hinged with wedding-ring ; They'll shut out Care, if she should dun ; At Love's light knock they'll open swing. Woul'l Time's keen blade their " locks " deplete— Tho' '■ heirs " a springy " gait" should boast ? Would-gates at last grim Death defeat By btiuking bravely to their " post ?" '

Sweating Son kkeigss. President Lincoln and Mark Twain were each able to ' get off ' one pun each in a lifetime The budding Tom Hood who sends us the following, may live to outshine them both : ' The London correspondent of the Dunedin Star,' he says, 'writes that a gang of scientific thieves — whom he calls sweaters of sovereigns — will follow in the wake of the Duke and Duchess of York. He goes on to state that they sweat sovereigns to the extent of half 'Sk-cro ion. Now, as about half the crown rests on the brow of the sovereign, it would look as if those " scientific thieves " intend to make our future King- earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, juat like his humblest perspiring subject. Reading further, however, it is made clear that it is not his Royal Highness that they have designs upon but a coin of the realm, which isprobably more universally loved, snd which gives to the possessor of many thereof, not only titles — which it can buy — but, as Byron puts it, " wisdom, knowledge, power — all combined.' The thieves put the sovereign into an aoid bath which "sweats" or eats the gold until each £1 is reduced in weight and is worth only 17s 6d. Those rogues live not by the sweat of their brow, but by the sweat of the sovereigns. I know not what acids they employ or how they recover the sweated gold — and would not tell if I knew. 1

A Parson Politician. 'The Federal elections have provided at least one novelty for Australia — a parson representative in its first Parliament, in the person of the Rev. James Black Ronald, of the Presbyterian Church, South Melbourne.' So says one of our New Zealand dailies. The number of buttons in the collection plate must have been 'rideeculoußly large ' the week that Mr. Ronald determined to dive into politics. We prefer to regard the idea as emanating from the rev. gentleman himself, beoause we do not think that even a body of elders could be ho hard-hearted as to suggest suoh a step to their ' meenister.' We always looked upon politics as — well, a good many cuts below the minitjUy, anyway. But there arc evidently oth^r people who think differently. One Cabs and Another. There is more than a Blight similarity between the case of the Marquis of Headfort — who has scandalised all his friends in the ' huppah suokles ' by marrying an actress (the daughter of a Dublin bootmaker) — and the alleged Spanish ' heiress ' who entered a Madrid convent without the permission of her mother. Both parties are twenty-three years of age, and the mothers in both instances attempted to control their actions. The Spanish mothe appealed to the law — which is probably 'a hass.' And the la w decided in her favor ; as a young lady in Spain is legally supposed to not know her own mind until she has reached the age of twentyfire years. The English mother appealed not to the law, but to the Commander-in-Chief. And the Commander-in-Chief ordered the Marquis — a lieutenant in the Life Guards — off to South Africa, and to be confined to barracks until his departure. But ' love laughs at looks and locksmiths all,' and in the present instance snapped its ohubby and sacrilegious fingers even at the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. The loving pair were duly • married and done for. 1 The English papers that — on the false and ex-parte statement of an anti-clerical paper — wept so many valuable tears for the Spanish house-mother are for the most part quietly chuckling over the at least equally great woeß of the Dowager Marchioness of Headfort. Which reminds us for the eleventy-'leventh time that it makes a considerable difference whose ox is gored. In Fab Cathay. ' Frederick W. Eddy, the special correspondent of the Boston Herald in China, writes from Shanghai under date January 8 (cays the Boston Pilot), on the recent outbreaks againßt Christian missionaries. He maintains that the Chinese are not bigoted, that they are not opposed to Christianity as a creed, but that their hostility was provoked by missionaries who concerned themselves overmuch with the temporal affairs of communities. Mr. Eddy has no Bpecial liking for Catholics, yet he pays them this tribute, which must indeed be well-merited when he yields it : — " Catholics regard close oversight of personal affairs as a legitimate function, bat usually they exercise it discreetly. Their mission methods and principles leave no room to doubt the negation of self in all they undertake. (Italics ours.) While zeal for a cause may send into a mission field the Protestants who come into China, it probably does them no discredit if many of them have thought of other lines of work for which they intend this to be a preparation. Catholics come expecting to stay, with none of the vacations or long leaves cuitomary among Protestants. It is their life work and for life and knowing that they take care to ingratiate themselves and to persuade the people that they are to be with them and not apart from them. While Protestants, under orders usually from Home offices, abandoned their stations last year, the Catholics vacated mission fields only under force. Nearly all the stations now occupied in the distant interior are held by them. They are at their work as usual, while there are so many Protestant missionaries in this settlement (Shanghai) that one may feel sure of meeting some of them, whatever direction he may take at any time of day." ' Marriage-shops. Marriages — some at least — are made in Heaven. But in Victoria and New South Wales matrimonial agencies (or ' marriageshops,' as they are called), have taken a hand in the business ; and if they have not made angels weep they have at least produced misery enough to make glad the heart of the prince of the fallen angels. The Rev. Mr. Kinsman in Melbourne claimed — and with considerable show of reason — to have tied more marriage-knots than any man in Australia. Each of Napoleon's soldiers was Bupposed to oarry a marshal's baton in his knapsack. Each of Kinsman's marriage certificates contained a divorce-petition written upon it in invisible ink, which came out in bold characters all too frequently before the honeymoon was well over. Kinsman's bad pre-eminence bids well to be eclipsed by a man professing to be ' a priest of the Orthodox Greek Churoh ' in Sydney. This gentleman ties the knot for a marriage-made-easy shop there, at a contract of eight shillings per pair— whilst his ignorance of the English tongue keeps him from asking inconvenient questions. This Greek has

not been long enough in Sydney to acquire a passable knowledge of English, but he has been there quite long enough to have at least one pair of his • tying ' seeking: the aid of the Divorce Court. Mr. Justice Walker, who tried a oaee recently, made Borne blistering remarks on matrimonial agencies and marriage-shops in genera], which were, he said, a disgraoe to the State and should be sup* pressed by law. 'Language was given to man to conceal his thoughts ' — so the saroasm rune. But the Greek tier of slip-knots, in the case under review, ' read ' the Anglioan marriage servioe in a way that concealed everything but his ignorance of the English language. But then, the duties that matrimony impowa art ' Greek ' to most of the candidates that patronise those agenoies ; and the arrangement should therefore be a happy one. For freeing Grecian (marriage) bonds the Divorce Court should prove more effective than Byron's sword, But— there is no poetry in it all. Heb Name Was Bbiqid. We have been frequently called upon to determine questions of nomenclature— olan-histories, surnames, etc. — and even to suggest half-a-dozen or half -a-soore of ' pretty names ' for his Royal Highness the Baby. On no fewer than three occasions we have had to settle the correct spelling of the name of Ireland's virgin patroness. The following historical remarks upon the subjeot from our valued San Francisco contemporary may anticipate some further questionings in point : ' The ancient writers, as well as modern authorities generally, write the name of the Virgin Patroness of Ireland — Brigid. It is only in some modern English and German and other foreign English-speaking writers that we find Bridget and Brigitt, etc. All the ancient hymns, biographies, and praises of the virgin write Brigid. So Fiech, her contemporary, St. Nenius, her confessor (known also by the name of Laimbiohain). St. Columbkille, A.D. 656 ; St. Aileran of the Clonard School, A.D. 664 ; Laurence of Durham in his Hypognostioon ; in the various collections by Colgan, by Cogitosus ; in the manuscripts and old prints ; in the libraries of Europe, including the manuscripts at Oxford ; in the Roman Breviaries ; in the office of the saint on the first of February, and wherever the name occurs in the Roman Breviary ; in the churches and institutions under her patronage in her native Ireland ; in all the modern English sketches of any pretensions as to accuracy or research, such as O'Hanlon'B Lives ; in the magazines and current literature of Ireland, such as the Irish Eccleiiattical Record, the reports from the educational institutes of the Christian Brothers, the Irish nuns, the official ecclesiastical records, etc., etc , all give us, with a few misprint or miscopied exceptions, Brigida, or Brigid. It is in writers like Ledwiok, whose special object seems to be that of ridiculing Catholio faith and tradition, that we find Bridget introduced. The " ts" and hard "ds " stick in the teeth— they are dentals effectual in satire and ridicule. They are not at home to soft, sweet, Irish " Brigid," in which the "d " is always left soft, and in which, in some cases, the " g " becomes as if written " cc," giving us the nearest original to the plain and beautiful and moat sweetly suggestive construction of Brigid, viz.— Bride. St. Birgitta, or Bridget, was a holy woman of Sweden, a widow, whose name ocours in connection with remarkable revelations about the Passion of our Blessed Lord, and is often confused with the Mary of Erin — the Virgin St. Brigid.' Associated Homes.' At the last meeting of the Dunedin Fabian Society a paper was read entitled ' Associated Homes,' which advocated the system of three or four families clubbing together to live under one roof, and go ' whacks ' in a common dining-room and a common kitohen. The paper claimed that this system would turn earth into heaven ; and the Fabian Society actually appointed a committee to see whether it would or not. Only the Fabian Society would do that. People with sense could easily see that all the blessings of Associated Homes can be enjoyed even now by becoming 1 an inmate of a workhouae. The two real blessings which do seem, beyond all doubt, to attach themselves to the system are, strange to say, not mentioned in the paper. They are (1) the facility it would give for learning the ins and outs of somebody else's business ; (2) the faot that it would reduce the number of plain cooks in the world by about seventy-five per cent. But these two advantages, great as they are, are more than outweighed by the four million odd. oonoomitant disadvantages. For instance, it could easily happen that Mrs. Jones hearing a creak in the stairs, and thinking it was her lord who had been detained at the offioe till 2 a.m., would go to meet him on the landing with a potato-masher. And it could easily happen that the figure stealing up the stairs in the dark would not be Jones but Brown, who had been down with a little rough-on-rats on the charitable errand of terminating the nocturnes of Robinson's dog. The mark of the potato-masher over Brown's ear would naturally lead to developments between Jones and Brown and Mrs. J. and Mrs. B. and the young J's and the young B'#— besides letting the Robinsons know who it was poisoned their dog. When things

Would reach this stage, you can imagine what a happy scene the 1 common dining-room ' would present — especially if the porridge happened to be lumpy or the joint underdone. No : the disadvantage of knowing nothing about your neighbor's business and of having four plain oooke where one would do is as nothing compared to the ordeal of Bitting down to meals with three or four hostile families, who, you know, are notioing every bite you take— perhaps hoping it will choke you — and one of whose male members, you feel oertain, will finish before you and go up-town with your umbrella. Ob • for the comfort* of a 'appy 'ome I In the words of that prolific poet, ' Anon ' : ' Bee tever swumbel, there snope lay slyksome.'