In Lighter Vein

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 44, 31 October 1901, Page 18

In Lighter Vein

(By 'Quip.')

*•• Correspondence, 'newspaper cuttings, etc.. intended for thi department should be addressed ' Quip, 1 N.Z. Tablet Office, Dunedin, and should reach this office on or betore Monday morning.

The Black Cat. A rather curious incident is related by Mias Cargill, one of the Monowai passengers, in connection with the finding of that vessel. On the Wednesday evening:, at 6.30, the engineer saw a beautiful black oat on board, and immediately concluded that the ship would be picked up that night. Of course, the inference was, by all the rules of logic, irrefragable. And right enough, as fate would have it, that very night the Mokoia hove in sight and rescued the drifting Monowai. That made the connection between the blaok oat and the rescue as clear as proof of Holy Writ. Dr. Nikola scored his biggest successes when bis yellow-eyed demon of a black cat was purring or double-arching her back and fuzzy tail beside him. A black cat is clearly a lucky piece of furniture about a place if there's a logician or a wizard on the premises, to ' read ' him, and as soon as the Union Steamship Co. places one of the sable felines with, of course, a skilled interpreter— on each of their boats they will earn the everlasting gratitude of the travelling public.

The Roman generals of old carried odd coops of game-fowls, with a pack of fortune-tellers who professed to foretell the fortunes of war by the way in which the birds negotiated their feed-grain and pollard. And as this is, par excellence, the golden age of fortue-tellers, I see no reason why shipping companies shouldn't have at least one official black cat, or a spirit medium, or a palmist on board for the comfort of people who find euoh things indispensable to civilised existence when on shore. My neighbor Mrs. Browne, for instance, had to leave her boots unlaced yesterday until she sent for her guiding-star, the 'futurist,' and. learned that, for that particular day, the left boot was to be laced first. Rome was once saved by the cackling of a flock uf geese ; why not the Monowai by the purring of a black tomcat ? I ehould, however, like to have this little difficulty cleared up : How on earth— or on sea, for that matter — did that oat swim the 2.">0 miles of ocean that separated the Monowai from New Zealand on that Wednesday evening ? If it didn't swim the distance— and I am half inclined to think that it did not — that cat must have been on board on October 17, when the Monowai broke down. Of course this does not alter the fact

that a blaok oat is always a sign of lack : it simply means that sometimes the lack is bad.

War News. Ever sinoe Lord Kitchener ' disqualified ' the armed Boer burghers with his proclamation, every corporal's secretary and other officer under him has been following' suit in a more or less prodigious way. • Expand, expind,' says « Dooley.' And this business of posting proclamations is being conducted on a scale so regardless of expense that a paste-train for the front is now a permanent institatiou in South Africa. The Acting-Commander of Jansenville, Cape Colony, has been one of the latest to break out to the extent of making history. According to the Cape Town correspondent of the Morning Leader, this is what this young Buonaparte recently worked off his martial chest : ' For obvious reasons, the present continued cock-crowing by night must cease. Residents of the town will, therefore, please arrange not to have more than one male fowl of orowable age in their possession after the 18th inst. By order, (signed) G. Wigratn, Lieutenant, Acting Commandant.' * The rooster— so Shakespeare says — • Doth, with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat Awake the god of day.' The ' male fowls ' around Janaenville used to keep up this tradition of their race, but now they will have to let the aforesaid god addle his head with sleep and ccnfine their attention to prospecting for flower-seeds in their neigh bora' gardens. The ghosts of the locality too, will be greatly inconvenienced, as, lacking the familiar chanticleer's watchman-cry, they will now have no means of knowing the psychological moment after the witching hour when they ought to go home after they have revisited the glimpses of the moon and scared the eye-brows off the home-returning toper. Moreover, the proclamation seems to me superfluous, because Mr. Atkins is, like Diana and Nimrod, a mighty hunter, and it is to the lift degree unlikely that he would leave many roosters alive in the vicinity, whether of crowable age or not But, on the other hand, they may not like roosters particularly ; for is not this the season of the fine fat duck and the podgy Michaelmas poise down yonder? In that case the proclamation may be justified, becauße there is nothing more annoying 1 to a sentry than to be btartled from a Bweet sleep and happy dreams by the raucous song of an inconsiderate rooster. The law is to be strictly enforced — bo strictly, indeed, that the soldiers have to carry their rifleB with the hammers down, because a half-cock, you know, might give a half-crow.

Old Nick Still Alive. The Irish Bench has produced a goodly bunch of judges wbo could not alone — in Drydon's words — ' see a joke further off than other men, but make one, too.' Norbury, ' the hanging judge,' with the black cap on his pointed pate, cracked jokes that made the reporters chip flakes off their front teeth with crashes of laughter. Lord Morris, lately deceased, had a sly wit, buttered thick with the richest brogue that ever melted in the mouth of a Munsterman. M.A.I 1 , has been telling how it worked its way rut during a trial in Coleraine in which a gentleman sought damage* from a veterinary surgeon for having poisoned a valuable horse. ' The issue depended upon the question of how many grains of a certain drug could be safely administered. The dippensury doctor proved that he had eiven eight grains to a man, from which it was to be inferred that 12 for a horse was not excetsive. " Docthor, dear," paid the Judge, " never mind yer eight grains in this matter of 12, because we all know that some poisons are accumulative in effect, an' ye may go to the edge of ruin with impunity. But tell me this : the 12 grains— the 12, mind ye — wouldn't they kill the divil himself if he swallowed thim ° " " 1 dou't know, my Lord," said the doctor, pompously drawing himself up ; "I never prescribed for that puient." '• Ah, no, docthor dear, ye never did, more'a the pity ? The ould boy's alive still ! " '