King Country Chronicle Wednesday, April 5, 1911. TOPICS OF THE DAY.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 350, 5 April 1911, Page 4

King Country Chronicle Wednesday, April 5, 1911. TOPICS OF THE DAY.

j I So the rain has come at last, and all !around goes up a paean of tbanksgivS ing that the drought has broken. For j three long months now the King i Country has suffered from an unpre- | cedented dryness, in a meteorological sense, leading one to suppose that : Nature was bringing her laws into : consonance with those terrestrial laws : affecting the King Country and more ; especially its liquor-drinking inhabiti ants, which are denounced or ap- . plauded, according to the mental bias :or insight, whichever you like to call it, of it inhabitants. But apart from this lighter aspect of things, there are other points of view which may well be considered for a moment, in passing. The drought has not been all bad. We have felt its miseries in our pumice-covered townships, but away back the dryness has cleaned upthe land and killed off many of the ■ noxious weeds, Certainly the "burns" - have never been on so complete a ; scale before. Crops have suffered and •■ are unlikely to recover completely, : but the gentle refreshing rain falling at the time of writing will do a power of good to the grass lands and to field and garden produce generally. We sometimes grumble, after a long season of wet, weather, at the apparently limitless quantity of moisture exuding from the skies. Our late experience of what losses in values of stock can result through drought will lead us to contemplate with a certain equanimity even a week or a fortnight's fairly heavy rain. Up to March 31st, just under 3 inches had fallen for the year. There is considerable leeway to make up this year before we can be considered to have had our average annual quantity.