FUN AT AN INQUEST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3767, 1 June 1907, Page 2

FUN AT AN INQUEST.

A Juror Entertains the Court.

A hardy Norseman, whose hair, like that of the vikings, grew long behind, infused a suspicion of mirth into some rather sombre proceedings at the morgue at Dunedin recently. Like most deaf persons he appeared to think that everyone else was similarly afflicted and in reply to the Coroner’s “ What are you ?” he left his chair, and putting his mouth within an inch of the Coroner’s ear, shouted, triumphantly, “I’m seventy-five.” Then resuming his seat and narrative, he sketched in the same stentorian tones, a pretty little bush landscape with himself in the foreground cutting wood, in the middle distance a woman appeared with his dinner, and a fire was lit and cracked, the billy boiled, and the two sat side by side amid vast bush silences. “Then,” said the viking reflectively, “we had a smoke.” “ Oh, you had a smoke, did you ?” observed the Coroner with an emphasis on the pronoun. The old man gesticulated impatiently, and made another expedition to the ear of the Coroner, “No,” he roared in a voice that threatened to shake the building, “ we both had a smoke.”