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Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1608, 4 September 1874, Page 346

It is reported that Major Atkinson, the member for Egmont, has accepted the vacant seat in the Cabinet. At the nomination for Waitemata, Messrs Macfarlane and Von der Heyde were proposed. 'TLe show of hands was in favor of the former. It is understood that the manager of the Australian and New Zealand Land Company had arranged with the Wellington Government for the purchase of 20,000 acres of the Oroua block. The terms of purchase are that Douglass pays 12s 6d per acre for the land, and undertakes, within a given period, to expend at least £IO,OOO in improving the property and settling seventy families in a special settlement; each family to have an allotment of 100 acres. The transactions need confirmation by an order in Council. The Evening Post, in a leading article on Wednesday night, says it has reason to believe that Mr Vogel strongly urged Mr Stafford to join the Government, and that the latter flatly refused, notwithstanding that Mr Vogel offered to resign the Premiership, and go home either temporarily to negociate loans and mail services, or permanently, as AgentGeneral. Mr Stafford not only refused) but strongly objected to Mr Vogel's leaving the Colony, and pointed out financial danger looming ahead, and said that he thought by Mr Vogel's policy the country was placed in a position of a precarious character. He most forcibly dwelt upon the duty of Mr Vogel's awaiting in the colony the result of his own doctrine. For himself he (Mr S.) refused absolutely to have act or part in the matter. If Mr Vogel's policy succeeded, he had no wish to claim any credit for it; and, if it failed, he wished the reponsibility of the failure to rest upon the right shoulders. A writer in the Bruce Herald relates* some particulars of what came to pass after an entertainment given in an Otago township by the Kennedy Family. An Irishman keeps a hotel there, and most of the people in the place are Scotch. But they have no prejudice against the Irishman's hotel. His whisky is remarkably soft and strong. But this in parenthesis. Well, the people went quite wild over Mr Kennedy's entertainment; and a number of them, after it was over, got into the Irishman's hotel, and devoted themselves to enthusiastic praise of " Tvva Hours at Hame," and a consumption of whisky, on what newspaper reporters would call " a most liberal scale." But an apple of discord was thrown amongst them. A native of Ireland, who was present, insisted that Mr Kennedy was a countryman of his; for, ho said, it was morally impossible for him to bo a funny fellow and a Scotchman. He out-talked the company, as is the wont of the finest pisantry in the world, and he finally was left very drunk, insisting to no larger audience than the landlord, that Mr Kennedy was Irish. The landlord agreed with him, but he would not leave, so the landlord put him outside the door, and let him argue in the street. So he kicked in a panel of the ■ door, and howled through the hole that Mr Kennedy was an Irishman. Then the landlord went outside and knocked him down and left him. But since being knocked down is a national custom, its effects were very evanescent, for he got up so soon as the doof was shut, put a stone through a pane of glass, and reiterated that Mr Kennedy was an Irish man. Then the landlord came out and knocked him down again, and, in order to cool him, put his head into some nice soft mud, sat on his body to make him take his medicine, and called for help. But the landlord forgot that he had recently engaged an Exile of Erin, in the shape of an immigrant, as a servant. Ho ought not to have forgot it. For the Exile hearing his master's voice crying for help, and burning to distinguish himself in the land of his adoption, jumped out of bed, seized a specimen ef Irish timber, which he had imported with himself, and rushed down stairs into the street. There he saw a head, and acting upon the sweet lessons-he had learned at his mother's he hit it. Hit it very hard. That head was the landlord's, and none of them cared to talk about what happened afterwards.