NEWS AND NOTES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3715, 10 November 1927, Page 1

NEWS AND NOTES.

lii 1925-26, 18,371,000 rabbit skins were exported from this Dominion. A loud speaker has been used successfully as a scarecrow in South Germany, where a fruitgrower suffered severe loss from feathered thieves. The primary schools in the Wanganui Education Board district will close for their annual summer vacation on Friday, December 16, re-opening on Tuesday, January 31. Rustless steel studs for % use as traffijc direction indicators are to be given a trial in Wanganui, a sample having been received by the City Council." They are an American idea and can be easily put down, it being necessary only to drive them into the bitumen. A Stratford motorist reports a strange experience when motoring recently in North Taranaki. He came upon a hare and a cat sitting on the crown of the road, about a yard apart, looking at each other. Cox Gordon, licensee of the Thistle Inn Hotel, Wellington, was fined £1 and costs for accepting a quantity of cigarettes in settlement of an account. It is a penal offence for a hotelkeeper to receive payment for liquor other than by cash, cheque or money order. The, Stratford camp site is one of the best I have seen in New Zealand,” said the secretary of the South Taranaki Automobile Association! at the annual meeting. The site was well sheltered, had water laid on, a swimming pool close (handy, and was generally most attractive. “There is plenty of work here foxgood men on big jobs,” says an exWanganui resident, writing from Sydney. “This is a good show. Of course, there is unemployment about, but only among labourers.” The executive of the South Taranaki provincial division of the Farmers’ Union is heartily in accord with the petrol tax. While the dredge was working in the Otauru stream on Saturday morning near the small bridge oil the old Foxton road, it came in contact with the telephone lines causing the latter to come down with the result that telephone communicaJion with Montoa was cut off. The lines were repaired during the afternoon. ’ The lambing season just concluded in the Wanganui district lias been an exceptionally good one, tip percentages being higher than last year. An estimate in the district from the Rangitikei River to the Patea River, and extending back behind Raetihi, places the percentage at 86, but the figures arc over 100 on some of the lower undulating lands along the coast. In the back country the percentage has been between 60 and 70 to every 100 ewes, the lossbs by wild pigs having been very slight. Settlers state that the reason for this is that the pigs have kept well back in the bush, where there has been a plentiful supply of berries. “Everyone prides himself upon his common sense and makes a boast of open-mindedness,” writes Dr. F. Aveling, reader in psychology, University of London, King’s ■College, in the Daily Mail. “This is so true that it is the deadliest of affronts to call a man a fool, and unforgiveable to hint that he may be pigheaded. Yet common sense is a most uncommon quality, and an ppen mind a curiously unusual phenomenon —at any rate, after earliest middle-age. What most people mistake for common sense is a kind

of horse sense, the greatest common measure —though, surely not a large one!—of practical beliefs. What most call open-mindedness is no more than readiness to adopt one stereotyped: tradition in place of another, every one of which can be summed up in a vulgar proverb.”