REPORTED CAPTURE OF TE KOOTI.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 19, Issue 1280, 22 March 1872, Page 2

REPORTED CAPTURE OF TE KOOTI.

A. rumor was brought to town to-day by two natives from Waikari, that Te TCooti was captured by Ropata on Wednesday last. They profess to have derived the information from a European source. No details are given, and the report requires further confirmation, but it is very generally believed.

The deposits in the northern districts of New South Wales are attracting attention. The Elsmore Tin mining Company, with a capital of ,£60,000, was floated in the course of a couple of hours.

A late "Victorian paper says :—lf the Victorian wheat-growers wish their produce to find a good place in the Loudon market, they must avoid such practices as one of their number has been guiltv of We have been informed that on Tuesday one of the leading firms in town bought a sample quantity of tine wheat for shipment for England. Each bag was sampled, and bulk was approved of. Fortunately for the buyers and for the credit of Victoria, the bags holding the wheat were too old for shipment, and it was necessary to turn the wheat into new bags. While this was being done, it was discovered that the centre of the bags was filled up with rubbish and shrivelled wheat fit only for fowls'food. None, we are sure, will be louder in condemnation of such a practice than the farmers generally of the colony, and it is a pity that the delinquent's name has not been published.

We pay out* Ministers (writes the Melbourne Telegraph) with a tolerable liberality, and that very payment adds to the difficulties of their position ; for men in Parliament are tempted to intrigue for power no*- only because it is pleasurable, but because it is profitable. Hence Ministers are continually on ; trial for their lives, or at least their ! existence. And our constitution is so {'rained as to include this startling anomaly—that the jury that tries a Ministry is composed of the men who, if it is condemned, will enter upon its possessions. A steward who should manage property just so long as his competitions thought he handled the estate discreetly, would not feel very sure of his position, and would be driven to all sorts of tricks and stratagems to " divide and rule ; " and it is precisely this position in which our Ministers are placed, and it is precisely these tricks and stratagems they are too often driven to in older to keep a majority together. One of the most pleasurable sensations of the month (says an English paper), has been the issue of the first volume of Mr John Forster's " Life of Charles Dickens." The eagerness of " the trade " to get hold of the book was extraordinary ; the, whole of the first edition was instantly sold off, and a second is in course ot publication. The volume contains matter that is news not only to the public, but to members of Mr Dickens' own family also. In autobiographical passages he himself states that when a child of ten years old, he was obliged, owing to his father's troubles to hire himself out as a tiny assistant in the establishment of a blacking maker, and that for a long time he was occupied in the work of sticking labels on blacking-bottles, for which service he received so small a guerdon that between its smallness, and the inability of a child to control his passion for pastry and the like, he was often at the end of the week very hungry and without the means of satisfying his hunger. He says that the impressions made upon him by humiliation and hardship were so strong that it " made him cry" long after the birth of his eldest son. But these things he never told to his family. The volume describes his early successes, but does not come down to the time when his domestic arrangements became the talk of the countty. Over this, portion of the story Mr Foster will, no doubt, go with a delicate hand. The work is dedicated to the great novelist's two daughters, Miss Dickens and Mrs , Qharjes CoJlin,s,.