THE WEEK.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 80, 3 April 1875, Page 2

THE WEEK.

v Qur' Wellington visitors have returned to their homes, and carried with them very favorable accounts of the reception they met with in Nelson, and, on the whole, the late encampment appears, to have given general satisfaction. Tie volunteers are all the better for their outing, and the lookers-on enjoyed their last Monday's holiday, and the fun of the review. The complete success that attended the late meeting, is likely, to. lead to such gatherings becoming more frequent, and being on a larger scale, the muster not being confined t.o;?the;, volunteers of the district in which it is held, with perhaps one small detachment from elsewhere, but including' companies from various partß of the colony. Something of this kind would tend to make volunteering more popular than half a dozen prize firings, in which but a. limited few from each province take part. That bringing the men together from different parts does them good was very clearly proved by the effect produced upon our local Artillery corps by the presence of the Wellington, men. Those who saw the gun drill on Saturday, and. again on Monday will bear testimony to this, and. will be inclined to believe tbnt competition is the.soul of volunteering.. It is astonishing what a little honest rivalry will do. At last wo have in the town of Nelson some evidence of the existence of the public works policy of which we hear so much from the other provinces* ; A visit to the vicinity of the mud-flat, where is to be situated the town terminus of our railway, will fully repay the trouble, for there is always something cheerful and inspiriting in seeing a number of ; men at work, and here, at one end, we have one gang engaged in laying the rails, which are eventually to extend to Foxhill, (I wish I coulJ say where after that), and at the other another lotat work in picking away the hill, which has already supplied so much good material for road-makin». It is possible that ere another week has passed the youth of Nelson will have had the opportunity of witnessing a locomotive at work for the first time in their young lives. I wonder how many years older they will be when they see the first train arriving, either from the Bluff or from the West Coast, and whether any of the little ones we see running about . our streets in such numbers will on that occasion relate to their grandchildren the impressions created on their mind by the engine that dragged, the first bier load of mils or sleepers up Toi-Toi Valley. However, I suppose we must learn to be satisfied with small blessings. Nelson bos gone through a long course of instruction in the virtues of patience and long suffering, and if she does occasionally kick against the neglect with which she is treated, on the whole she bears her ills very good humoredly, too much so perhaps for her own interest. We have heard a good deal lately by telegraph about measles being very prevalent in the other towns of the colony,, especially Auckland aud Wellington, but until very lately we were pretty free from them here, but now they have at last made a start and appear to be making up for lost time, greatly to the disgust of the doctors' poraee — if not of the horses' owners — ,who.h;aye to travel at a smarter pacethun they bave been accustomed to of late in order to ; get over the additional amount of ground they are required to cover in the day. Fortunately the disease has ■'hitherto shown itself in a comparatively jmild form, and not a single case has iyet terminated fatally. Our .Acclimatisation Society with its •a'Ctive* secretary at the- head will be | getting itself into trouble if it is not 1 more careful and judicious in the selection „of .its importations. We occasionally hear a growl from some unfortunate individual who has had his j cabbages oaten by the deer," and now andrthen a select, committee is appointed by some Farmers' Club to hold a '"post : mortem examination upon the corpse of a epaf row, and reports upon the number of grains of wheat found in its crop, but these are but very light offences compared with what are attributed to other imported birds. The skylark, it appears, when thoroughly acclimatised in Nelson becomes a bird of a most ferocious and warlike character, so, at least, it .would seem from a recibnt telegram in a Wellington paper relative to the Volunteer encampment. ,My cx r perience of the skylark here has been that becomessomewbat languid and lazy in its habits under the influence of our relating climate, and to such an extent is this laziness carried that it occasionally prefers to sit on, a fence and warble iprlh its notes to soaring aloft "for that purpose. I was therefore somewhat startled by the following ! piece of news in the! telegram alluded .to :-t-V Some skylarks attacked the camp last night, and one was shot in the face with a blank cartridge." Poor larks! surely you wero deserving of'Wb'eker reception. 1 , , F. Writicg with .regard to the JustrinTime claim, the reporter of the Inangahua Herald says : — "The question may suggeßt itself to some of ycur readers as ,to why — since such rich stone was obtained in the earlier wo iking of the mine, and of which we had such palpable evidence from the first crushing, 1700 and odd ounces of gold from 408 tons of quartz— nothing of any consequence has since been obtained,;;. It might be answered by stating thai the shareholders, , having met with such excellent success in the '

first instance from atone near the surface, have never since undertaken to open up the mine at a low depth as long as there was a prospect of taking out surface quartz, and the result is that at the present time all the surface stone has been gutted out, and they are now obliged to drive into the hill, and I anticipate seeing them meet with very satisfactory results. In this opinion I am in a measure supported by what has been already met with at the south side of the mine. It will be remembered that, the first crushing from this side gave loz 19dwt, the second rather moro than J^oz, and in the third instance the crushing wbb very poor, owing to the fact that the stone had run out to the face of the hill, and was scarcely more than mullock. Since then, however, they have been compelled, in order to get quartz, to drive along the reef-line towards the centre of the hill, and the result is that although the lode is thin it has continued to hold and shows good gold, with prospects of improving. Also, at the north end, where the rich stone was obtained for the first crushing, no work has been done for the , past twelve months until within the last two weeks, when the manager started a chamber with the object of prospecting for a continuation of reef, which I have very little reason to doubt he will be succeßSful in intercepting, and of seeiug the claim once more emerge from a state of depression." A curious experiment is being tried in Melbourne at present. The Argus says: — The Nelson training Bhip is to bo used to test the question as to whether measles has been propagated in the colony by contagion, or whether it has arisen from a certain condition of the atmosphere. The Nelson has been put iv quarantine, and for nearly three months communication between those on board and those on shore has been stopped. There are over 400 boys in the ship; but., up to the present time, not a single case of measles has occurred among them.