AN EXPLANATION.

Evening Star, Issue 3865, 14 July 1875, Page 3

AN EXPLANATION.

To the Editor. SlB, —I have been, am, and will continue to be, the “ certain James MTndoe” inquired for through your columns by the ‘ North Otago Times.” I sent to the Mayor of Oamam a copy of petition, on the envelope of which I placed an adhesive postage stamp. If the Mayor says he had to pay postage, then the mistake has been mine, as many go«d men have erred before me. I did not use his Worship as an advertising medium, nor will I use him for spiritism—scope enough for both here, so far as my ambition trends. I confess there is a simplicity about the whole affair which my friends Safer me by telling the tale—such is my characteristic, almost amounting to a simpleton. The derivation of my name, sir, is the emblem of simplicity, otherwise harmlesssness —wise as serpents, harmless as “ doves.” The son of the pigeon must surely maintain his hereditary character. But to say my smile is “ childlike and b’and” (is this a quotation from an Oamam poet?) is surely not accurate. I never did belong to the soft goods department, nor were my aspirations during my professional life to eke out a scanty subsistence by playing or touting for a billet. My worst fiiends canupt, and will not, accuse me of such truculency. Might I ask your scissors when he cuts out a paragraph from a contemporary to do it as he finds it, not put an untruthful statement in another man’s mouth ?

Fairplay to your Noithern friend: he did not say the Mayor had received a petition signed by me ; Buch is not the fact. So far as advertising is concerned, if such is the light in which it is to be received I have done more than any othpr man, sane or "elfish, would do; payed the whole Co3t out of my own pocket, and not by contribution from the Provincial coffers or anywhere else.—l am, &c, J as. M'lndoe.