Page 2 Advertisements Column 3

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 200, 22 August 1879, Page 2

The Inangahua Times says :—Constable M'Donald, formerly of the Reefton police force, has, we believe been appointed gaolkeeper at Greymouth. While in Reefton, M'Donald, when off duty, was in the habit of seating himself on the threshold of the lock-up and making night hi resonant with the tootlings of the bagpipes. A friend of ours who happened to be passing the camp on one of these festive occasions, when the martial soul of Big Mac was throbbing fourteen to the dozen to the sonud of the pibroch, remarked that he had heard of malefactors being sentenced to imprisonment and the lash, but imprisonment with hagpiping was, i_ his opinion, a step beyond, and if capital punishment was done away with, no more fitting substitute could be found than that. The Charleston Herald published the following extraordinary telegram from its special correspondent in London: —" Insurrection iu Hades has been suppressed." We hope the special correspondent is a reliable authority. The best efforts of United States factories cannot produce steel rails for less than £40 a ton. Iu Kuglahd they can be turned out just now for £22. It may convey hope and comfort to some " maid whom there is none to praise and very few to love," to know that 70,103 bachelors of fifteen yeara and upwards are wandering about the colony, with only 25,07l maidens of the same mature years to fill up the cup of their happiness. But taking what are shown to be the beginning of the marriageable years - fifteen with the girls and twenty with the men —there are 191 bachelors to every 100 spinsters. The girls ought, therefore, to have " a good time." The Moscow correspondent of the Cologne Gazette says that the entire number of Russian "settlers" iu Siberia is at present estimated at about 300,000. Being asked what made him so dirty, an unwashed street Arab's reply was : "I was made, so they tell me, of dust, and I s'pose it works out."