LATE LOCALS

Hokitika Guardian, 10 March 1920, Page 3

LATE LOCALS

Mr Clarkson, the Avell-knoAvn clarionet player of Greymouth, Avill be a performer at the Irish .National. Concert next Tuesday night. The Hokitika Silver Band have kindly consented to play a suitable programme outside the Theatre on the same evening.

A Wellington telegram states that the War Graves Commission has approved* of the application from New Zealand for memorials at four sites in Europe, viz., ti e Somme (Factory Corner), Messincs (The Square), Graven? stafel (Crossroads), and Le Quesnoy. 1 It is not known what transpired regarding the sites nominated at Anzac and in Palestine.

An Aka run correspondent writes:— The walnuts arc again badly affected by blight. Great trees are dropping shoals of nuts prematurely, the blight evidently having attacked the stalk of the nut as well. So far one has not beard of any definite specific: having been tried as a preventive. That seems, indeed, a pity, for a well-grown healthy tree in past years lias produced anything between £l2 and £lo worth of nuts, when the price was fid per lb or even less.

“Accommodation of any kind in America is sky high,” said Mr Harry Cohen, who arrived from San Francesco last week. “You are fairly lucky if you get a room for eight dollars a day. That is not a first-el >ss hotel by any means, but what would be known as a comfortable second-class place.” In Sail Francisco it was also an acute question, as high as 17 dollars per day being charged in the good hotels. “The elicitpeet meal T got there,” said Mi- Cohen, “was breakfast for one dollar fifty (Os).”

That was quite a, shrewd and wellmanaged move of the Canterbury members of Parliament in congratulating the new (Minister for Public Works hot on the heels of his appointment (writes “Mereutio” in the Auckland “Herald”) They got in fir s t with their congratulations and, what, is more to the point, they got the claims of their railways in first. It could not have been done more promptly unless indeed they had entrusted the letter to the Prime Minister, unaddressed, to he delivered t<, the new Minister when selected. A\ hen another- such occasion occurs any district that wishes to bn ahead of Can. terlmry must resort to some such plan. Meantime Canterbury is to he congratulated on. its activity. Tf Mr Coates is to consider the railways in the ordo: in winch lie heard of them officially Canterbury will have an easy lead.