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Ashburton Guardian, Volume I, Issue 11, 21 October 1879, Page 3

What Meekness Did.— The other day, a woman in West Manroe-street said of another woman in West Manroe-street that her house was like a hog-pen, and that her carpets wore encrusted a foot deep with the dust of ages, and so on. Her meek neighbor did not Hare up at this keen criticism, but gently replied that now that Mrs X. had pointed out her duty she would endeavor to fulfil it. Accordingly, on the following Monday, just as Mrs X. had hung out her washing on the outer clothes-lines, the wind at the time blowing a three-quarter breeze from the west, the woman sent two burly negroes armed with huge clubs into her yard to beat her 186 yards of carpet. Mrs X. ’s house is the next door to the east, and at the first whack a well-developed sirocco swooped down upon the back premises and made the milk-white clothes look as if they had been thickly peppered ; at the second whack they turned of a muddy yellow ; at the third the hired girl, blinded for life, broke loose and tore towards the house, knocking down several props and cutting her mouth back to her ears in a vain attempt to swallow a tightly stretched line. The chickens went to roost thinking it was night, and before Mrs X. could shut the windows her house was full of grit and fluff. And when, after four hours of the frenzied labor, the exhausted negroes fell panting to the ground, the meek neighboi came out on her back stoop and soliloquised very audibly that sbo guessed her carpets were clean enough now to satisfy even the most censorious critic.—“ American Paper.”