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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 131, 3 June 1879, Page 2

A lucky miner named Charles Thompson (says the Charleston Herald) who has been working at the Six Mile for the last three years, and who ha 9 during that time netted the handsome fortune of £1500, took his departure, on Monday last, for the land of his birth— Switzerland. He, however, forgot, to pay his debts, among which was the money advanced to enable nini to buy into the claim in which he made his money. An elderly man named Peter M'Cormick, a school teacher, who has been for a long time addicted to drinking habits, vras found drowned in the river Wangonui on Saturday last. The "West Coa9t Times of a late date says : —An exchange of courtesies took place by letter yesterday between the Town Clerk juid a certain citizen. The Town Clerk wrote a short letter as follows :— "Sir,— -Take notice that unless your dog is registered within two days from this date, proceedings will be taken against you in the Magistrates Court." Within ten minutes he received the following reply :— " Sir,— Take notice that unless the amount, £6, due to me by the Borough Council, be paid within two days, proceeding will be taken to recover it in the Magistrate's Court." And so the matter stands. .. .._, From the Globe we learn that it is contemplated to cover the whole of Regentstreet with a glass roof stretching above the houses on either side, thus affording complete protection from rain, while at the same time iusurine; good ventilation. After dark the huge arcade would be illuminated by electric sunlights placed at regular intervals along the centre of the arch, thereby diffusing a more pleasant and equal light than under ordinary circumstances. An American exchange says :— Schemes for making money are never wanting, and, therefore, I do not expect to create much interest when I announce one more. However, my scheme may be strongly recommended to those living in large towns, and to those who are interested in parish affairs and urban improvements. There are several moves in my iittle plan of amassing filthy lucre, and it will be better, perhaps, to state them in order : 1. You busy yourself in parochial matters, and get upon the vestry. 2. You ascertain that certain dilapidated buildings are very shortly required for improvements. By your position upon the vestry you are enabled to worry theowner with sanitary inspector's visits and notices of all kinds, until he is weary of his property. 3. Having thus worried the owner, you innocently propose to, and do, obtain the property upon lease for a long term of years, at a far lower rental than it would have commanded before the sanitary inspector and other bogies appeared upon the scene. 4. The bogie being quiet, you purchase the property as innocently as you obtained the lease. 5. You then await the natural course of events, and sell the property to the parish for two or three times the amount that you gave for it. Et voild lout. .The Sydney correspondent of the Christchurch Press writes .- — The Exhibition buildings continue to rise with startling rapidity. I visited the site the other day, not having been there for perhaps a week or ten days, and I was fairly electrified by what I saw. The superstructures which had been fitting in the workshops had in the interim been reared into their places, and in lieu of the vague low range of joists and ties which were all that was to be seen on my former visit, this time the skeleton of the major portion of the huge building rose before me. Ifc will bo a " big thing," and no mistake The progress of the work has, since I last wrote, been threatened with serious interruption. Over 650 carpenters were at work, and of these 170 suddenly struck for an increase of wages ; and as strikes 'are an infectious disease the number of strikers was before many hours had elapsed swelled to 400. They had been receiving Is 3d per hour, and demanded Is 6d, at first on the grounds that bricklayers were making better wages weekly than they. This, however, was quickly shown to be a ridiculous plea, inasmuch as the bricklayers who were making more money were working longer hours, owing to emergencies and so forth. That plea was rapidly abandoned, and a deputation on behalf of the strikers waited on the Premier to urge compliance with their claims, k and took the grounds that theiricrease was due on account of enhanced risk to men working on the Exhibition. There was no possibility of denying that Is 3d per hour was the current trade rate. Sir Henry Parkes was adamant, and public opinion waa obviously so utterly opposed to the men, that whatever hopes they may have entertained of enjoying the easy and comfortable times which the anti-Chinese strikers were enabled to have, in consequence of support, both moral and pecuniary, pouring in from all sorts of quarters, disappeared, and the strike collapsed as rapidly as it bad arisen.

The fteib Zealand Tablet Company has declared a dividend of 10 per cent upon paid up capital. : •*••• : In Victoria, a member of a Municipal Council is not eligible for the office of Mayor!. Mr Aarona has just resigned hia seat in the Melbourne Couucil iv order to run for the Mayoralty next year, when the Exhibition wilt be held, and rthen the Prince of Wales is likely to pay the colony a visit. The drought appears to hare been severely felt in the Cape Colony, for the " Standard and Mail " writes :— Fresh butter is now being sold retail at Port Elizabeth at "five shillings" per pound) and a Port Elizabeth paper deplores the sad fate of the residents at that place in the following terms '.— " We were first overrun with flights of moths, then of caterpillars, and now of hard shell beetles. They appear everywhere. Walk where you will out of town, and you become aware of their presence by the crushing of something hard under foot. Only a few evenings ago we saw one drop between the leaves of a programme at a concert aud ball in the Town Hall." . The Hon. John Sheehan receives the following notice from the Timaru Herald %— " He has lived among the natives, and studied their peculiarities, and managed their affairs from his earliest youth. He speaks their language like one of themselves. He has travelled all over the North Island, and dwelt in Maori .fashion in almost every Maori settlement of any importance. He has made his reputa- ■ tion as a Maori lawyer. He is, in short, so thoroughly Maori, that but for the immutable' laws of physiology, it would be a wonder i that he has retained his white skin so long.; He is moreover an unusually observant man, with talents far above the ordinary, and has>{ a great deal of that peculiar force of character; which might be supposed to give him control over the mind of an uncultured but warm- I ; blooded people. Without saying anything ill-natured of Mr Sheehan, we may add too, that for natural cunning he has not his superior in the country." Saya the "Loafer in the Street," at a ■) certain Christchurch hostelrie it is the fashion to have a counter supper, a custom which is' j fully appreciated by the habitues. A young gentleman recently arrived from England, , called in at this establishment; and glancing , through the medium of an eye-glass at the j pile of sandwiches on the counter, said, ah, so sweetly, to the barmaid—" Are these arrangements —ah — pro botio publico." " Well, no sir," answered the presiding Hebe; " they are ah— Beef." Then it was the young man from England felt almost sorry that he had left his cousins and his uncles and his sisters and his aunts, and slowly skipped oa his homeward way. ! The famous 50,000d01a cow which was so much talked about in American a few yeara ago, has found a rival in point of proportionate pecuniary worth in a SOodols chicken. The English Agricultural Gazette says that a game cock was recently sold for the above excessive price, and suggests that in the future the raising of such chickens would prove a very lucrative source of income. The same journal, we (Scientific American) notice, says that over 13,000,000 dols worth of eggs were imported into England in 1876, and yet the supply- was short of the demand. Here is an opening for poultrymen, and a wider field for inventors of egg-preser?ing processes and egg-carrying devices. Vessels are considered of the feminine gender because they run each other down.