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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IX, Issue 296, 15 December 1874, Page 2

It is reported that the Monte Cbriato Company at Lyell have 130 tons of quartz ready for crushing, expected to yield soz to the ton. News from Poverty Bay stales that the prospects of the Petroleum Company aro very encouraging. The manager eunk a shaft 'for water to a depth of 17 feet from the surface, and opened a spring yielding from eight to ten gallons of oil per day. A clerk named Lyell, in the branch of the Bank of New Zealand, at Marion, has absconded. He is charged with having embezzled a large sum of money. The matter has been placed in the hands of the police. Mr William Speedy, of Waiuui, East Const, in the province of Hawke's Bay, has applied for letters patent for a method of pressing wool so as to economise space and render tho wool-press movable. A warning to the topers of Lake Wakatip is couveyed in the following characteristic advertisement by a distressed aud angry publican, which appears in the Mail ;— •'• As it is impossible for me to get a verdict in this court against anyone owing me money, I hereby give notice that, if all parties indebted to me while proprietor of the Prince of Wales Hotel, da not settle their accounts within one month from this date, I will advertise their names in full, and the amount of their accounts." The Town Clerk, says the Wanganui Evening Herald, has taken out summonses claiming rates in some instances dating back to 1865, against various absentee ratepayers. A woman and her three children have been fatally poisoDed at Maekay, Queensland. The father found a bottle containing, what he believed to be Epsom salts, and some time after, the mother and daughters, neediog medicine, partook of the contents of the bottle. The four of them died almost immediately, for the dose they had taken was strychimne, and not salts. "Yankee Grab," saya the Auckland Echo, baa received its death blow. The Onehunga Magistrate fifled a publican for allowing tite "rattling of bones" in his house — holding that it was gambling within tbe meaning of tbe Act. Nothing is now left but tbe old-fashioned "odd man out," or the still more antiquated " shake in the hat." A horse was offered for sale to one of the rival coach proprietors, somewhere in the Grey Valley recently, with a recommendation that tbe animal would make a "splendid offside poler," and as a further inducement a guarantee was offered that the ''moke could be backed to kick a strange driver off the box-seat quicker than any other crock on the road." The Southern Mercury thus writes of tbe goldfielrfs of Ot*go:— " The desertion of our gold-fields, which has been going on during tho last twelve months, and is still proceeding, is a matter of the most serious importance, demanding the immediate and earnest attentiouof oar Btatesmeu. From our oldest and best established, as well as our most recent gold districts, tbe alarming intelligence comes that gold mining is being abandoned by numbers of the trained men who have long pursued it as their occupation, and that a lerious and permanent diminution of production must inevitably follow." Commenting upon tho sale of Hobart Towa jams in Auckland, the Herald makes the following remarks, which are quite bb applicable to Nelson as to Auckland :— ln a few weeks Auckland will be supplied in superabundance with most kinds of the best descriptions of fruit. Peaches at sixpence per kit, cherries at a mere trifle per pound, currants, pluraß, and other products of tbe orchard, in such quantities that the demand will not be equal to the supply. Yet do we depend on a sister colony for that which we could furnish in almost any quantity from our own gardens. la 1873 we im* ported into tbe colony bottled and preseived fruits to the value of £18,000, and green fruit valued at £25,000. All this shows a most unaccountable want of turning our native products to account. Here is £43,000 sent out of the colony for that which we produce, or should be able to produce for ourselves. Jams are an article of everyday consumption in the colony, and there is no fruit which is convertible into them we canuot grow.