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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XII, Issue 56, 6 March 1877, Page 2

The Grey River Argus suggests that if the residents of a city want their Corporation to clean up the streets and look spruce, they must get the Governor to promise them a visit. The Wellington Argus says the Government Life Assurance department is out of ' order, the officers discontented, and the business suffering. As in duty bound the New Zealand Times contradicts this. A nightman in Wellington threw quicklime on two dogs that annoyed him. The eye of one of the poor animals was burnt clean out; the other dog, which was seen by its owner in great agony, was, it is supposed, made away with by the defendant for he disappeared in the night. The magistrate could'nt give the brute brute's punishment— the lash —but he fined him 40s, or 14 days imprisonment with hard labor; and the defendant, who declared that he had done nothing to be ashamed of, accepted the alternative. Visitors to the Kumara now are invariably astonished at the progress made in the township in so short a time. There is a township there in reality, and by no means a small one. The place, a correspondent informs a northern contemporary, presents a striking and picturesque appearance. The town is V shaped, and contains some well-built and even handsome buildings, which are necessarily confined to a limited space ; aud scattered round, as it were, in different spots, are tents, inhabited by miners and others. Through the centre of the town a long road extends into the " country," and along this road at different parts are clusters of tents, or little mining camps ; but the town is literally surrounded by bush, and it seems ' therefore to be in a deep valley. As the traveller and visitor approaches it it has been described as one of the most interesting sites.it could be possible to imagine. The following complaint appears in a letter in a Southland paper: " Swagging it down country, I was met by a man who wanted men for harvest. I accepted the offer, but was quite satisfied with that little game in three days, for three days and nights of greater misery I never put in. We worked from seven in the morning till eight at night, and sucked our drink from a bog in the middle of the harvest-field, and of all the places in which any man lay to rest, for filth, smell, and fleas, I think that hut could not be beat. The ridge battens being gone let the rain in vertically, and all the other planks being warped, split, and broken, sent a general shower all around. Old potato bags, harness, and everything dirty was stored therein, and the fleas of the district made it their mustering-ground. And yet the man who so worked and housed his people was not a poor man. No; he sent his daughter to a Dunedin boarding-school, and kept a piano in his house, if he kept nothing but filth and fleas in that of his men, and I daresay would be hard to persuade he was anything but an honest and upright man."