WAYSIDE NOTES.

Evening Star, Issue 2913, 20 June 1872, Page 2

WAYSIDE NOTES.

(FROM our special correspondent.) Now that the fever of Provincial politics is past, you will perchance find room for some more jottings anent men I have met and things I have seen. I intended to have written no more “ Notes,” having been in danger of my life by my Clyde transgressions and other verbal iniquities; but the cacoethes scribendi, like kleptomania, cannot be repressed, and hence my present effusion. I knew the zeal, money and Bellamy of Provincialism would have, ere this, afforded me no room in your columns, so I managed to obtain, like our politicians board and housen at her Majesty’s expense until the busy season was over. I went from Clyde to the North Pole, and saw nothing there but snow and ice and the footprints of the seven fallow deer. Men get gold there in the lato summer time; but as I have always been either too soon or too late in my wanderings, i shall leave the description of this part of the country to some other Arctic explorer. Instead of wandering among floe ice and sperm whales, I gently trotted, in company with a friend, to the Nevis, and give your readers the results of my journey. The Nevis is a Tom Tiddlers in iNcw Zealand—a twin brother to the Nokomai.

The Wardens Clerk visits the locality once a month, feeds his horse, and goes back again to the City of the Ironsides. He is when there a kind of Warden’s deputy, or a Simon Pure in small clothes. Not afflicted with mayors or policemen, priests or paupers, having neither a gaol nor a church, the Nevis ean only be considered a settlement in embyro. We met a relic of barbarism on the road at a place called the Half-Way • louse —shilling drinks. I expostulated and paid, and expostulated again—went on my way and found ou my return I had not tried to benefit the public in vain, as “the word in season ” had fallen on the conscience of the vendor, and made him reduce his tariff some 50 per cent. When you leave the Bannockburn Flat you have a gentle climb of 3,000 feet over what is facetiously call a low saddle. Until I stood on this “ low saddle,” I could form no idea of the geography of the Nevis, when I could take it all in at a glance, and may describe it thus It is a long glacial valley, some thirty-five miles in length, heading from the Nokomai Saddle and emptying into the Kawarau, about Edward’s Punt. It is separated from Lake Wakatip by the Remarkable Range, from the Bannockburn by the Garrick, is a larger stream than the Arrow, and, like the Hollyford, runs nearly north. The glaciers have done their work badly, as there are several gorges in the river-bed which they should have ground down. la is too late, I suppose, to get the process repeated. When you once get on the top of the hill you can understand the meaning 'of ,the [proverb, Facilis decendent Averni —it generally freezes there and the condition of the road may be inferred from the fact that one man was once seen attempting repairs on the Nevis side of the Garrick Range. At the foot of the hill we saw a man thrashing corn, holding the sheaf in his bands, and beating the ears against an empty beer barrel, collecting the corn thus thrashed on a sheet. He being the keeper of a shanty, we of course wanted something to drink ; but as he mistook your reporter for a detective, he informed us we must cross the river to the other side. We there found a long spare bilious melancholic man, behind the counter, wearing a large rednight cap surrounded by all the heterogenous mixings of an up-country store—soap, sardines, gum boots, castor oil, Crimean shirts, sluice forks, and similar ingredients for comcssation. He told us the Nevis was gone to the devil; that the Chinese were spread over the land ; that not content with impo.-ting their stores and whisky direct from Dunedin, they had actually the vileness to compete with him at butcher ing, and retail mutton at threepence per lb. I condoled with him and told him for his consolation that pig-tailed humanity could descend no lower than the shamble?. He insisted on our having another whiskey, and launched straight into Provincial politics. He had evidently a touch of “ Moa Flat Sale” on the brain, and actuaTy had the impudence to assert that Donald and Rip Van Winkle must have had a “ tip” from the “big one” to square the transaction. I only repeat the man’s meaning in his own nomenclature, and leave it to the wise to understand. He said Mac. was a good whip —but he wanted a heavier thong—and many other things, when I got on my horse and rode away. I found afterwards he was a defeated candidate—and I then learned what the sense of degradation must be to be beaten by the member for Kawaru. I advised him on my return to leave off the red and wear a night-cap made of green, bearing a motto like “Erin go brack,” “Faugh a bailagh,” or some similar national device. He would not then be beaten again I would guarantee. ’Tis four miles from where the man with the night-cap dwells to the township. It stands on the western bank of the river, surrounded by old workings, and is the most unique thing of the sort your reporter has lately seen. It is a dual town. It contains two houses—no more. They are both hotels, stores, and butchers shops. They appear to have been built and furnished from all the job lots and deceased effects in New Zealand. Vou enter one door and see Dr will see his patients from 10 to 4; another that you are entering the Bank of New South Wales ; while one butcher’s shop is, I am informed, the remains of some old Methodist chapel. All jthe sardine and kerosene tins in the Colony one would imagine had been collected to cover it in—and such a dismembered arrangement in the way of habitations is a hard thing to be found. The social customs of the people in the township are also peculiar—they charge their customers nothing for meals or beds when at the hotels—thereby inducing a roan to spend 20s, for what should cost him only 1(D.