SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 1875.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 131, 2 June 1875, Page 2

SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 1875.

Licensing Covet. — The sitting of the "Wakapuaka Licensing Court, which was to have been held yesterday, has been adjourned to Saturday next, at the Court House, Nelson. Resident Magistrate's C et. — James Somerville was this morning brought up on remand on the charge of stealing a purse containing £3 2s sd, and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, „ "Waimea. South Jockey Club. — | A •meeting' of the stewards was held at Richmond on Monday evening, not for i the purpose of paying the stakes, as was at first notified, this having been done immediately after the races, but in order to draw up a balance sheet for the year. After paying all expenses the Club has some £20 to its credit. We hope to see an amalgamation of the town and country clubs, for if this were brought about we might hope to have one good meeting in the year, instead of two poor ones as at present. Palse Economy. — It has been reported to us that owing to the insufficiency of the gaol staff only half the prisoners, of whom there are now eighteen males, can be taken out at a time, and that they are under the charge of one warder, so that in the event of one of them trying to make his escape, the man in charge must either suffer him to get away without an attempt to recapture him, or must leave the rest of the gang to look after each other. Under no circumstances whatever should the prisoners when out at work be placed under the charge of one man, aud surely the labor of the nine who have now to be left at home would pay the wages of an additional warder. P RESENT ATimLToMR SMITH. — The pupils attencßp^^he Bridge-street School yesterday presented Mr Smith, the late Head-master, with a very handsome silver-plated inkstand and a silver. mounted penholder. The following letter accompanied the present : — "Nelson, May 28, 1875.— Mr John Smith, Head-master of Bridge-street i School. — Dear Sir — We cannot suffer you to leave us without presenting you with the accompanying small token of the respect and affection with which we regard you. Wherever you may go you carry with you our best wishes, and we only hope that your successor may be as good and kind a master as you have been.— We are, dear sir, your loving scholars — L. Webster, G-. King, B. Connell, W. Hodgson, V. Hooper, for the rest of your scholars." Mr Smith, after thanking the boys for their handsome present, addressed to them a few farewell remarks, to the effect that they had it in their power to give a still better proof of the affection and respect which had prompted their address and its accompaniment, namely, by transferring to his successor, whoever he might be, the orderly behaviour, attention, docility, andprompt obedience which had, generally speaking, characterised their conduct towards himself. Mr Smith, we are sure, has the best wishes, not only of his late pupils, but of the parents of all the large number of boys who have been committed to his care. We heartily wish him every success in his now sphere. The Proposed Loan. — The followiog is the schedule of public works approved of by the Select Committee, and unaniadopted hy the Council last night: — Roads: Hope Valley, £1500; Bulier, Inangahua, and Charleston Districts, £3500; Brighton to Razorback, £1500; Grey, £5000; Hampden and Lyell, £3000; Rai Valley, £1500; Tophonse to Kopara, via Hantner Plain, £5000; Golden Bay District, including roud to Riwnka, £4000; dverland t<> liaramea, £2500; Stanley Brook, Dovedale, and Baton; £1500, completion of road from Budge's Line through Big Bush, £1000. Bridges : Motueka River, £6000; Wairoa River, £3000; (Jrey River ut Cobden— proportion ot N^Sison Government Ist instalment, £1000; Ahaura, Lyell, and Ohika, £9000. School BuildiDgs, £1000 [The above was crowded out ot our yesterday's issue], A fatal accident occurred on an Auckland railway last Monday. The driver of-the train from Auckland to Ellerslie, on arrival at the latter station, about five o'clock, reported that he had met with an obstruction on the line about midway between Remuera and Ellerslie, which/ the engine jumped over, A man was despatched down the line, when at the spot indicated he came upon the mangled remains of a man who had evidently been run over by the train. The body lay across the metals, the skull being cut in twain, and one of the legs severed from the body. Life was extinct. The remains Jwere picked up and conveyed by the return train to the Auckland railway station, where the police identified the body as that of William Shields, a notorious vagrant, who was lately discharged by the ,

upon his promise to go to the Waikato. He was seen at the races with gambling appliances. Upon examination it was* found that the severed leg was missing, and one of the police was despatched to find it. Tpie Dunedin letter of the New Zaa'^and Times says:— "A well-known merchant in this city, and agent for one of the insurance companies— Mr G. H. Campbell, of the firm of Calvert and Campbell — is very much missed here just now. He took his departure sud denly yesterday, in the ship William Davie, bound to Hongkong, and he did this without so much as bidding adieu to a numerous but select circle of friends and creditors. This coming to the ears of certain parties who were very auxious about him, a sergeant of police was despatched on board with a warrant for his arrest; but Campbell was hidden under the sofa in the captain's cabin and the capture was not made. It is now said that for the three or four years he has not been solvent, and that when everything comes out a bad case will be shown. The insurance company for which he was agent will, it is thought, suffer to n considerable extent. He has, too, been the ruin of a ver|r worthy tradesman, who, through backing a bill for him for a considerable amount, has brought himself to an insolvent condition. The Australasian, in an article on New Zealand, says : — The curiosity is, how has the government of New Zealand been managed all the while of the absence of the Premier ? Things must have gone on in a happy-go-lucky way — which the provincialists may argue is due to the excellence of the existing system, though that argument may readily he answered. A reader of the New Zealand journals will know that while the Premier and Treasurer has been absent from. Wellington, on his money-borrowing mission, for nine or ten months, the Native Minister has been spending about the same period of time in passing from tribe to tribe in the North Island to settle intertribal and tribal disputes : the Minister of Justice (who has not yet met Parliament) has been absent for months in Canterbury ; the Colonial Secretary has been spending his Parliamentary holiday in Auckland ; the Minister of Immigration has been heard of occasionally from Otago and Southland, though hailing from Taranaki ; the Commissioner of Customs has been addressing and visiting his constituents in Dunedin, and then running up to inspect his training ship for stray larrikins at Auckland ; and the Minister of "Works has been here, there, and everywhere, in the very proper work of seeing to the railway contracts. It would appear that Wellington has been blessed with the presence of but few Ministers during the late long recess, i and the Government has really been in the hands of the civil servants. Strangely enough, too, it is a legal question whether any Ministry exists in that colony at the present time ; for when Sir James ITergusson resigned, and his Ministry — as a legal necessity — fell out of office, no steps were taken to nominate their successors, and it was only the other day that the Marquis of Normanby appointed the first member of his Ministry (the Hon. Dr Pollen) to be Colonial Secretary and Chief of the Executive Council. Whether there is a Constitutional Ministry in New Zealand at present — with the Premier in England, and the six other members scattered over the colony — is a debateable question. At all events, the present state of things is a curious illustration of how easy it appears to be nowadays to govern a colony once so troublesome as New Zealand. This is a sample of what the Lytlelton Times says about tn*e Official Handbook of New Zealand: — " It is not many years since every poet or novelist, who had a hero he could not dispose of by shipwreck or battlefield, or any of the other ordinary quietusgivers of fiction, sent -him. off to New Zealand, leaving a feeling on the reader's mind that he had done the very best for his hero that human nature could demand for such a being, that he had sent him to a happy Valhalla, whither the pen of the fiction-writer dare not or need not penetrate. The broadside of New Zealand poems and novels and experiences of the last ten years, has not quite done away with the practice among the skirmishers 'in the rear of the great army of authors. But we will effectually put a stop to it npw that the Colonial Government has taken elaborate pains to disenchant our modern fiction- writers' Valhalla by publishing an Official Handbook. If it were only its dirty drab covers, its illegible maps, its blurred photographs of the least picturesque scenery, its primitive artless woodcuts, the curiously inappropriate distribution of them through the volume, and the enormous number of blunders in the letter-press, the volume is equal to at least two Cospatrick disasters as a dissuasive from immigration." Lady Burdett-Coutts, in a letter to the limes, urges regulators of* the fashions to try and use something else than birds' feathers as ornaments. She says that humming birds in particular are fast being exterminated to meet the demand for their feathers, a single firm ' having imported 40,000 of them. The Baroness ui'ges the encouragement of the ribbon trade, now in languishing condition, or the trade in artificial flowers, or the adoption of imitations of birds in silk jewellery, " rather than a mode of ornamentation which must suggest a blood-stain on the delicate hat or cap, and has silenced the joysong in the breast of a fluttering, harmless creature."