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Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3513, 11 October 1882, Page 2

The teachers of St. John's Sunday School are requested to meet after the usual church service this evening: in order to make arrangements for the annual treat to the school children. A full attendance is expected.

By a telegram from Dunedin we learn that Messrs J. S. Large and H. S. Ruddock have been appointed local provisional directors of the Equitable Assurance Association, that is now being established in this colony.

We are requested to acknowledge receipt of the followug sums towards the Jack relief fund :—Members of the Napier Volunteer Fire Brigade, £5 oa ; Napier Eowing Club meeting, 16s; Mr W. Bogle, 10a; Mr E. E. Ingpen, ss.

In the civil case McPheraon v. Smith in the Resident Magistrate's Court yesterday judgment was giveu for plaintiff for the sum of £7, defendant to pay half of plaintiff's costs, viz., £1 14s; each party to pay the expenses of his own witnesses.

In the Resident Magistrate's Court this morning, before J. N. Williams, Esq., J.P., Thomas Ferreter pleaded guilty to a charge of drunkenness, and was fined «5a and costs, with the alternative of 48 hours imprisonment. Frank Mulligan, similarly charged, failed to appear, and his recognisance of £1 was estreated. The Court then rose.

The distribution of the Napier Rifles' company prizes will take place in the Council Chamber to-morrow evening at 8.30, when certain information received by Major Routledge and Captain Blythe from the Hon. Mr Bryce during his recent visit to Napier, respecting , the reorganisation of the volunteer force throughout tha colony, will be laid before the meeting.

The organ recital under the conductorship of Mr Gγ. J. Browne, that is announced to take place in St. John's Church on Friday evening, promises to be highly successful, and should attract a large attendance of lovers of high-class music Amongst others who are announced to take part we notice the names of Miss Mitchell, Miss Hitchings, and Messrs. Aplin, Girdlestone, and Slade. There will be no charge made for admission, but an offertory collection will be taken up in aid of the funds of St. Augustine's district. Wo have to acknowledge the receipt from the Government Printer of the following Acts of last session:—West Coast Peace Preservation, Waikato Confiscated Lands, Corrupt Practices Prevention Amendment, Trade Marks, Vagrant, Dog Registration, Railways Construction, Small Birds Nuisance, Justices of Peace, Stamp, Aliens, Patents, Protection of Telegrams, Employers liability, Gas Companies and Consumers Liability, Public Health, Offenders Disqualification, Private and Local Bills, Costs, Industrial Schools, Reserves Mining Districts, Native Lands Act Amendment, Native Land Divisions, and Supreme Court.

The weekly meeting of the Clive Square Mutual Improvement Association wag held last night, the Rev. J. J. Lewis in the chair. The question for discussion was, "la the phonetic system of spelling more desirable than the present method ?" Mr Diddams opened in the affirmative, and in an able speech showed the disadvantages of the present system, and the various points that would be gained by the introduction of the phonetic. Mr Cornford, who opened in the negative, upheld the present system. A capital debate followed, in which most of the members took part, ihe affimative ultimately winning the day by a good majority.

The returns of the Customs revenue for the half-year ended oOth September are moat satisfactory as showing that the colony is making substantial progress. The Colonial Treasurer's estimate for the year was £1,500,000, or £750,000 for the half-year, a monthly average of £125,000. The totals for thfl six months are as follows : —April, £109,363 13s 3d; May, £126,596 lfinGd; June, £110,187 13s lid; July £139,165 15s; August, £137,17.0 Us; September, £140,092 3s 8d ; total, £762,577 Is id, which gives a surplus of £12,577 Is id over the amount calculated on. In September, last year, the Customs revenue was £118,862 11s 2d ; in August, 1882, £137,170 Us; and in September, ISB2, as shown above, £140,002 3s Bd.

The Napier shareholders of the 3£asfc Coast Petroleum Companies will be glad to hear that aatiefactory reports have been received from Mr Hilton, the manager of the Southern Cross Company. The difficulties encountered in sinking through the first oilbearing stratum have been successfully overcome, the depth of the shaft being now J22tj feet. The escape of gas demands additional precautions. Petroleum oil is exuding frsely through the ground already passed through, and ia being casked. The prospects are reported to be excellent, while the trouble of sinking through ground that is continually rising from pressure of gas, though causing delay, being exactly similar to. what was experienced in Germany before oil was struck, may be regarded as a most eatiefactory indication of future success,

Wβ had to-day the pleasure of inspecting a portion of the new scenery that is being painted by Mr J. Briggs for the Wesleyan Church Fancy Fayre and Bazaar, which ia announced to open at the Theatre Royal on Monday week. The shop fronts, streets, &0., are excellent productions, and reflect the highest credit on Mr Briggs; and when the several parts are completed and fitted up it will be difficult indeed for the visitor "to the Fancy Fayre to conceive that he is in a. Theatre at all. In addition to the shops there will he a host of other attractions, including the celebrated May-pole dance by twelve little children specially trained for the purpose. Altogether, we believe, the Fayre will be one of the most complete and attractive that hae ever been attempted in these colonies. The committee of management will meet tonight, when arrangements for the opening ceremony will be considered.

The Lyttelton Times thus explains why some of the refrigerated mutton per ship Mataura only fetched a low price:— The fact is that a number of carcases of long, woolled ewes were in the Mataura shipment. Their weight was about double the weight reported as suitable for the market, while their condition was gross and coarse in the extreme. These are evidently the cheep condemned as over fat, and sold at averages of from od to s£d per lb. It is a great pity that these sheep were taken with the others. One comfort is that the mistake is not likely to be repeated. It will pay better to boil down these heavy sheep in the colony, than to sell their meat in London at 5d per lb."

We learn from the Auckland Herald that there is at present to be seen in the Museum at that place a large photograph of the greatest curiosity which New Zealand has to show, namely, the korotangi, or stone image of a bird. The Maori tradition is, that their ancestor.* brought it from Hawaiki. It was lost for many years, but was at length found near Kaglan by a European settler, and ultimately came into the possession of Major Wilson, of Cambridge, it has no appearance of being of Macri art of workmanship. It has been said that it must have been brought here by some vessel, and that having been amongst the Maoris for many years, and the manner of its arrival forgotten, it was, as a matter of course, said to hare been brought from Hawaiki.

The wife of a boarding-house keeper at Palmerston South named Foden has bean fined £20 or a fortnight's imprisonment for sly grog selling. The Palmerston Times says:—"When the decision of the magistrate was made known to Mw Foden, who is somewhat deaf, ehe appeared to entertain the opinion that her husband, being , the responsible head of the establishment, would have to undergo the imprisonment in default of the fine being paid. The delusion her husband was however instruoted to disabuse her of, which he did by shouting in her ear: 'I am discharged; you have to go to gaol for a fortnight,' in anything but a regretful or sympathetic tone of voice. Mrs Foden replied : ' I won't pay the fine; I'll go to gaol first, and take the fourteen days out.' She then shook hands with her husband, and gave him strict instructions to take care of the premises during her absence. The proceedings were both painful and ludicrous."

It seems strange (says the Australasian) that we should have to ascribe praise for courage to a clergyman, merely for venturing to preach a sermon in which he con» tends that actors and actresses are not necessarily abandoned reprobates, and the going to the theatre is not a crime. And yet no one will doubt that it required a good deal of courage for the Rev. E. A. Crawford to go to the theatre at Caetlemaine to witness a performance of " Hamlet," and afterwards to preach a sermon pleading for showing greater liberality of view and estimate towards theatres and theatrical people. And the worst of the case is that every sensible person feels that what there is on the other side opposed to his view is not the bigotry of Puritanism, which might, in its earnest narrowness, be respectable, but only a senseless traditional conventialism, which nobody any longer believes in. "It was," said Mr Crawford in his sermon, "a disgraceful and Bcandalous thing that because a man •waa an actor, or a woman an actress, they were to be regarded as social criminals."

The Alexandria correspondent of the Times gives the following incident that came under his. notice while examining the smouldering ruins:—" As I walked, bounding from side to side to avoid the falls of masonry, an offensive odour would cause me to look through the smoke. At last we distinguished two moving figures. We) went to them, and I acted as interDrefcar, while they told us a story which reminded one of Dante's Inferno. I have no time to enter into the descriptions of all they recounted, for I am writing this in a rolling shir, which is hurrying off with my despatch ; but the perfect calmness, the utter absence of excitement with which they told the tale of horrors, the business-like accuracy With which they showed -as where to go to find persons in distress, and the quiet manDtsr in which, after giving us all the information we required, they left ua to return to their work of danger and charity, as quietly as if there was nothing extraordinary in their position, was proof of a sort of heroism whioh won the admiration of all and compels me to gire their names. They were Pere Guillaume, a Belgian Franciscan, and Frere Mivielle, a French Lazarist."

An electrical disturbance took place at Otaki on Tuesday last (says the Manawatu Herald) that will not be forgotten for some time to come. There had been, lightning and thunder more or less all day, but about 9.30 p.m. there was a vivid flash, accompanied by a most deafening report, which alarmed people considerably. Several ladies fainted right away, and a number of the sterner sex turned very white. There is no doubt that something , struck the township, and struck it pretty heavily. A plank was torn off Mr Abbott's bakehouse, a shelf moved in the house, and a lot of crockery smashed. At the Family Hotel, two windows were broken, and two bricks knocked off the chimney ; at Mr Anderson's baker's shop, one window was broken in froni and two behind, and some bricks were knocked off the schoolmaster's chimney. Neither the natives or the oldest inhabitant can remember any occurrence of such an awful description before. It is most amusing to hear what different people did when the explosion took place. In the billiard room all the players got under the billiard table; in one private house the inmates immediately blew all the lights out; in another they started locking all the doors; some prayed, others made a miserable attempt to laugh, and every householder in Otaki thought at least twenty thunderbolts had fallen just outside his own back door.

Many an amusing dialogue (says the Dunedin Star) might be heard in the streets if it were courteous to listen to what passes in conversation between couples or among groups. Sometimes a tit-bit falls in the way without the hearer intruding uponlfio--speakers. Thus one morning a friend, tenjpted by the bright sunshine, walked towards the Stuart street jetty to enjoy the freshnesa of the gentle breeze, which ecarcely rippled the surface of the harbor. He reaohed the jetty about the same moment as a boat loaded with fish arrived. Awaiting it were an Englishman, a Chinaman, and a blacK negro. The Englishman and the black Feemed to understand each other ; the Ciiaee steod apart. The black hailed the crew, and the following colloquy took place : — Black : Vat urn take for fish ? Crew : All sold.

Black : All sole '. Who buy ? Chinee: You buy fisb.ee? Fishee mine , I sell you fiahee. Black: Fish urn your ? Chinee: Yes; buy ? I sell. Black (to Englishman) : Cum long, Jack. Urn's done by dam Chinee. White man no chance when dam Chinee cum. (Exeunt Englishman and Black). Sergeant Lawrence, this year's Queen's prize winner, is a native of Dumbarton, Scotland, and a working compositor on the Dumbarton Herald,

The attention of borrowers of umbrellas is called to the fact recorded in Truth, of London, that a man has recently been sentenced in England to eighteen months' hard labor for stealing an umbrella.

A contemporary refers to the " infinite injustice of 1633 people owning 11,054,000 acres of land" in the colony. No country in the world of the size of New Zealand can show a land monopoly like this.

One of the beauties of Church and State was lately made known in England. A dissipated young Earl, who died at the age of 26 from the effects of a vicious life*, had thirty-nine Church livings in his gift.

It is singular, says " iEgles," that on the Sunday after the receipt of the news of the destruction of Arabi's army the following occurred in the ordinary Church of England service for the day:—" Thou hast subdued Egypt, and destroyed it; Thou hast scattered their enemies abroad with Thy mighty arm."—Psalm Ixxxix., v, 11.

A correspondent of the Lyttelton Times tells the following , amusing mining story : —A man took a ton of quartz to a certain battery for a trial crushing. On calling a few days after to ascertain the result ho was informed by the manager that the yield was only half an ounce in the ton. ' Great Scott." he exclaimed, in the agony of his disappointment, "why I put two ounces of gold in myself \ "

A Polish journalist, M. Fryze, publishes in the Euryer Poranny, of Warsaw, an ac- " Count of an interview which he had with General Skobeloff ehortly before his death. IT. Fryze began the conversation by remarking that General Skobeloff had been co much troubled by interviewers that the very sight of a journalist must be obnoxious to him. "On the contrary," was the reply, " 1 owe my present position mainly to the Press, and especially to the English Press. If it were not for the special correspondents—of whom there were always some with me during the Turkish War—l should have remained a major-general, and no one would have heard of me."

Thackeray's picture of the abject servility of the British public is as absolutely true now as it was forty years ago. Suppose (says Truth) a nobleman is cf a jovial turn, the public will sympathise good-naturedly with his amusements, and say he is a hearty honest fellow. Suppose he is fond of play and the tnrf, and has a fancy to be a black leg, the public will fawn on him, and many honest people will court bitn, as they would court a housebreaker if he happened to be a lord. Suppose he is an idiot, yet by the glorious constitution he is good enough to govern us; he may be an ass, and yet respected; or a rogue, and excuses will be found for him. Snobs will still worship him.

" The awfully jolly girl" has been mentioned as the latest and perhaps the most appalling English type of her sex. " The other day in Richmond Park," writes a correspondent in the Pall Mall Gazette, " I came upon three or four of these epicine creatures, who were perhaps awful enough, but were by no means jolly. One wore a man's scarlet cricket-cap. All had their hair cropped close, and all four carried "yheavy walking-sticks. On inquiry, I was told that at Brighton and elsewhere, if; is quite common for young ladies to go about with walking-sticks and a convict's crop. Who the men that thes6 poor girls imagine they can attract by this ugly masquerade ?"

" A literary treasure," says.the Atbenseum of June 17th, " of singular appositeness has just turned up in the form of a preface written by Thaokeray for a second edition of his ' Irish Sketch Book,' but suppressed by the publishers as being too outapoken. The preface, which forms a long eeeay on the political situation in Ireland, will be published in the Century. In it Thacheray not merely supports the disestablishment of the Irish Church, which he says ' will no more grow in Ireland than a palm-tree in St. Paul's Churchyard,' but even the repeal of the Union. He goes so far as to prophecy that the latter concession will eventually be wrung from Sir .Robert Peel. The paper is said to be written in Thackeray's most vivacious and characteristic style, and will form a curious contrast to those acid comments by Carlyle on Irish affairs which are now appearing in the Century Magazine."

A recent telegram from London stated that the publication of the well-known Fraser's Magazine had ceased. It had been published for upwards of fifty-two years, the first number having been issued in February, 1830. Among its early contributors were Dr. Maginn, Barry Cornwall, Coleridge, Hogg, Gait, Dunlop, Jerdan, Edward Irvine , , Mahoney (Father Prout), Gleig, Carlyle, Allan Cunningham, Count

D'Orsay, Moil (Delta), Sir David Brewster, yLockhart, Theodore Hook, Southey, Gillies, Croker,Banks, Colonsl Mitchell (Bombardino), Lady Bulwer, Lady Mary Shepherd, and Sootfc. These carried all before them in the wide range of themes at their command. Of late years, as the old "'Fraserians" one by one died out, the character and influence of the magazine changed, and not for the best, though Kingsley and J. Stuart Mill contributed, and some of White-Melville's best works appeared in its columns. Priucipal Tulloch, -who took charge in 1879, thought to bring about a revivification by indentifying Fraser'e with the Liberal party. But he failed in this, and his subsequent retirement has brought about no better results ; its waning vitality was never renewed, and it has now sunk into oblivion. The London correspondent of the Age, who is an out and out Radical, writes:—ln only one respect have the friends of Lord Beaoonefield found fault with Mr Gladstone. They say that his attempt, frequently repeated, to trace the troubles in Egypt to the action taken by the previous Government is unworthy of any really great man. The Egyptian control was established by Mr Goschen, and it was purely financial. The more recent interference with the internal affairs of Egypt was initiated after the late Premier was in his grave. It was not he who gave the Khedive a solemn assurance

of being on his side, whether the assault came from Sultan or Pasha. It was not he i who sent an ultimatum demanding the exile >of an Egyptian officer. It was not he who entered into a virtual alliance with France to pstablish an armed interference. Mr Gladstone might, with as much propriety, throw the blame on Dr. Erasmus Wilson, because he brought Cleopatra's Needle to Thames embankment. To trace the recent troubles to Lord Beaconsfield, and at the same time to bear testimony to the wholly beneficial influence of the financial control, is merely a proof that he would, if he could, vilify a defunct rival, but cannot accomplish his purpose without bearing testimony to his wisdom. People who never liked Lord Beaconsfield now begin to look on bis memory with respect, and it is all Mrjjfladstone's doing." i As shewing the scale upon which the hospital service for the British army in ' Egypt WOB organised, we quote the following from Public Opinion:—"The medical arrangements for the force to be despatched to Egypt have been careful'y considered by the War Office authorities, and ample provision will be made for the troops in the way of assistance, both regimentally and in the field hospitals. Two bearer companies of the Aiiny Hospital Corps, eight field hospitals, general hospitals at suitable localities, and hospital ships fco convey the eick and wounded to the base of operations or to England will bo provided. The personnel of a bearer company, when complete, consists of 11 officers and 213 men, including the Army Service Corps, with full equipment in the matter of tents, ambulances, purgeiy waggons, water carts, &c. ; "y" those unfurnished with mountain equipment are given and cacolets, carried by mules or ponies, instead of ambulance waggons, as for a campaign in a sandy desert like the neighborhood of the Canal they are more suitable than wheeled carriages. Each field hospital is equipped for 200 beds; its staff is seven medical officers, one officer (Army Hospital Corps), and a proportion of non-commissioned officers and men for nursing and hospital duties."

In the Victorian Assembly, during the discussion on the Railway Bill, excited scenes took place, in the course of which Mr Bent (the Minister for Railways) said to Mr Fincham (of Ballarat): " The public have branded you as an unmitigated liar." An apology followed. iEgles in the Australian says:—The scarcity of water in the neighborhood of Mount Browne was something extraordinary. This is partly illustrated by an hotel bill rendered and paid by a traveller in the vicinity of Tibooburra, where the horsefeed and labor were scarce, as well as water:— £ s. d. To 21b of peas eaten by horn, 2s 0 4 0 To seven quarts of water for horse at6d 0 3 6 To cleaning up kitchen after said horse 10 0 To soap for Mary's hands after same 0 2 0 —Aβ a tavern bill this is almost as unique as Falstaff's. The name of Mr Van Reaselburghe, of the Royal Observatory of Brussels, may yet rank with that of Edison. He has discovered that the ordinary telegraph wire can be used for telephonic transmission, and experiments have justified the accuracy of that discovery. In like manner the inventor of " Sucar "Worm Cakes for Children " has proved himself a benefactor of the whole human race, as thousands upon thousands of parents everywhere cm testify. All ordere should be addressed to Professor Moore, Medi2al Hall, Waipawa.—[adyt.]

The highest tribute to the genius of any medicine is the fact that the profession, who are antipodal to everything that ia not erabraced within the range of their prescriptions, lend to it their unqualified approval, by strongly recommending it. This the faculty have done to Udoipho Wolfe's Schiedam Abomatic Schnapps, by not only testifying , to its merits, but even prescribing it, in many known and recorded cases.— [Adyi.l