Select Poetry.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 18, Issue 1125, 20 September 1871, Page 2

Select Poetry.

WANTS. Behind us #& the evening meal The greyh.ird ate his fill, Swung downward by a single claw, And wiped his hooked bill. He shook his wings and crimson tail, And set his head aslant, And, in his sharp impatient way, Asked, " What does Charley want P " " lie, silly bird," I answered, " tuck Your head beneath your wing, Aud go to sleep;" but o'er and o'er He asked the self-same thing. Then, smiling to myself, I said; How like are men and birds ! "We all are saying what he says, In actions or in words. The boy with whip, and top, and drum, The girl with hoop and doll. And men with lands and houses, ask •The question of Poor Poll. Whate'er vre have, we crave some more, We fain the bag would cram ; We sigh above our crowded nets For fish that never swam. No bounty of indulgent Heaven The vague desire can stay ; Self-love is still a Tartar mill pbr grinding prayers away. The dear God hears and pities all; He knoweth all our wants; And what we blindly ask of Him His love withholds or grants. And so I sometimes think our prayers Might well be merged in one; And rest and perch, and hearth and church ilepeat, " Thy will he done." J. G. Wiiittieu.

An inquest was held before the District Coroner on the 4th instant at Morikini Pa, Manawatu, on the body of Ngawari te Manakau, who died on the previous day. At first, it was supposed that he had been poisoned, but the jury at the inquest returned a verdict of "Died from natural causes." A remarkable invention is announced from that great breeding gro-md of labor-saving notions, the "united States. A new power of boring has been placed in the hands, of the human race by the ingenuity of Mr B. C. Tilghman, of Philadelphia. Let no one shudder at the announcement, protesting we have bores enough already, not excepting American ones; for we really did need thi-i bore, and shall be much benefited by it. What is it that is to drill for us all the tough holes in future, —what explosive is to blast, what new, most solid, case-hardened tool is, smiting, to vibrate, or, grinding, to revolve? The new tool is sand ; —yes, absolutely, that, most fragmentary, dissolute, and feeble of all things—sand j And how is sand to do it 1 Simply by being squirted in a continuous stream, —for light purposes by air-puff, or for heavy jobs by steam. About the most impracticable substance known is called corundum; it is little, if tit all, inferior in hardness to that prince amongst impenetrables, the diamond itself; yet with a jet of | quartz sand blown through a pipe by steam at 3001 b. pressure to the square inch, in less than twenty five minutes a hole, an inch and a half deep and of the same diameter, shall be made in a solid block of corundum. A blast of fine particles of sand, impelled through a flexible pipe, supersedes for the future a hundred operations in grinding, hammering, and knocking, in chiselling, whirling, and drilling. For mere engraving, as on glass, a simple oi air, raided by a rotary fan, and charged with sand, is all-sufficient, and enables the glass engraver, by using intervening perforated paper, lace, or other media between the sand-stream and the glass, to produce rapidly patterns the most minute, complicated, perfect, and altogether unattainable by any other process. A single particle of sand, blown against the object to be engyaved or bored, what can it do? Almost absolutely nothing. No visible or detectable effect succeeds. Its little tap against glass, or stone, or steel, is inaudible and seemingly result!ess. But there comes rapidly another, and another, and another ; in a moment of time a hundred, a thousand, such, little taps follow each other; and if the blast that bears the sand-grains is but strong enough, the best hardened steel gives way almost as easily as tallow, and corundum itself is cut through well nigh like cheese.