ONE THING AND ANOTHER.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 287, 18 April 1879, Page 3

ONE THING AND ANOTHER.

(Collated from our Exchanges.) " Chispa" in the Ashburton Herald is responsible for the following:— So Mr Wason has gone, too.. As the blanks to be filled rise before my eyes I feel tempted to ejaculate, with La Balafre to Quentin Durward, when' the youth recounted the almost total " dry up" of hja kindred— "Cross of St Andrew! What an onslaught !" I remember J. C. Wason's last speech in the Library Hall. On that accaeion he did a barefaced theft, and tried to rob the Old Pirate of * a good saying, and give the credit of it to the Great Job. But I wouldn't have it, and pulled him up short over the injustice of not giving the Devil his due. It is amazing how, in these high strung educational times, when every body objects to a " Godless" education, so few men seem to bo perfectly up in the grandest work of all our literature— the Holy Bible. Wβ find one resplendent light in the political sky crediting Moses' wife Zipporah with being the good-hearted lady who found the infant law-giver in the bulrushes ; another confounds the " tanner' first mentioned in Scripture with the Apostle Peter himself, forgetting apparently that the "tanner" was only Peter's landlord. I have hoard a wit say that the first banking transaction recorded in Holy Writ was when "Peter lodged with one Simon, & tanner" which every " horsey" man knows is a slang term for sixpence ; but to credit the fifherman with being a tanner of hides was top much, though he on.one accasion certainly did take very incontinently to ear T lopping. Mr Wason gave to Job the credit of saying, " Skin for skin, yea all that a man hath will he give for hie life." Mr Saunders on that occasion nearly put the hon. member for for Coleridge right— nearly, but not quite. Now, I find Mr Saunders at Mr Fox's meeting making 11 Moses and Aaron lead the children of Israel through the wilderness up to the time when they were required to make bricks without straw.', Peace was executed at Annley Goal on Tuesday, February 25th. The scene must have been painful in the extreme, and the accounts given of it, and especially of the speeches and letters of Peace himself, are exceptionally repulsive. Death seems to have been instantaneous, and the convict comported himself with perfect calmness. But before the fatal bolt was drawn he addressed a speech to the reporters which, if it eeems to savour of devoutness to some, will be disgusting to many more. It was a protestation of his belief in the Divine forgiveness, and the expsession of a trust that he (Peace) would meet all his friends and enemies—as for himself he had no enemies—in heaven. The speech ought not to have been published, for its only effect must be to bring religion into contempt. There is also printed an equally sickening account given by the murderer of the manner in which he killed—accidentally, as he calls it —Mr Dyson. Murder, he tells us, was against his principles. He always made it a rule never to take life if it could be avoided, and hence the conclusion, which he would leave upon us, is that Dyson owed hie death to his own ill-advised rashness. Peace has also left onjrecord a confession of a murder for which a man Habron is now serving a sentence of penal servitude for life. But ther.e is thus far no evidence to show that the confession has about it a grain of truth. The chances are that the whole story was trumped up by Peace at the last moment with a hope that it might excite an enquiry which would result in the prolongation of bis own miserable life. It is long since the public mind has had so hideously unhealthy a debauch cf excitement as that to which it has been subjected while Peace and his doings have been centres of interest