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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XV, Issue 31, 5 February 1880, Page 2

The Taranaki Herand publiahes a detailed account of a visit to Te Whiti by Mrs Bartlett,of the Opunake Hotel. She received quite an ovation from the Maories. Te Whiti supplied her with refreshment!, and had a long korero with her. She had nothing to fear, as he was father of all in the district, and he wanted to live at peace with the Euro peans. Mrs Bartlett was the first white woman who had come to Parihaka. He was very pleased to see her there, and if she wanted anything to let him know. Te Whiti then asked her if she had seen the prisoners when in Wellington, and all his questions she answered fully. He said there would be no fear of any fighting takiDg place, for the Europeans and natives were to live peaceably together. The English, he knew, were a very strong people — much stronger than the Maoris— and could crush the Maori to the ground if they chose, but he knew they would not do so. A Mr Gordon, who was present, asked if he would permit of his portrait being taken, but Te Whiti positively refused to permit it. In reply to questions put, Te Whiti replied that he would like to see the Governor if he would visit him in an official manner. He would not ask him to come — he must come of his own accord. He wished to be friendly with the Europeans, and they did not want to fight with them. The difficulty was about the land, but that could be settled with their tongues. A laborer near Wanganui drank for a small bet three and a half gallons of new milk in twenty-five minutes, the stipulated time being thirty minutes. Having finished the milk he ate his breakfast, and then went to work. A popular captain of an intercolonial steamer during a short stay in Melbourne was taken by his friends to see the lions in one of our colonial capitals. Among other places he was ushered into the presence of a legislative body, who were engaged in diacuseing the merits of a $ill for the 3uppreg-

sion of thistles. After he had exhausted hia curiosity, and had left the imposing chamber, he was asked what he. thought of the conscript fathers; to which he replied that they reminded him of a bad lot of steerage pasaebgers;'* I Mr j. M. terrier, the " Intelligent Vagrant," a journalist well known throughout jfew Zealand, and who aa lecturer to the Diorama of New Zealand so ttiufch entertained the pub,lic, is now engaged on the Sydhty JJaiUj Tetfdraph, an opposition 'paper to the Morning Herald. His articles on the " Night Side of Sydney " have been creating a great sensatiou io that city. The new paper has become very popular. The capture of the men who were brought up before the magistrate the other day at -Lambeth f§r printing f breed Bussian notes (says an English paper) stops one gr^at centre of distribution of forged ttussiati notes, but we may anticipate that there are plenty of other forgers at work on the same lines who will be more circumspect now that their competitors have been got out of the way. The evidence given Bhowed on what an enorundus Scale the manufacture baa been carried on. When the police forced" their way into the house at Tulse Hill, where the forgers were at work, they found thousands of rouble notes laid out to dry And the execution of these notes was so good that the magistrate could uot tell the. false from the genuine. The former, indeed, were the rather better executed of the two. How long this particular factory has been in full work was not staed, but evidently a few weeks would suffice to produce a very handsome profit ; and if there are other similar establishments, worked. with equal skill and energy, we may form some idea of the amount of bad paper-money now in circulation in the Bussian Empire. An elegant tombstone in the Melbourne Cemetery bears the following inscription:— " This Blab was laid by George Frederick Price Darrell, in memory of his wife, Mary Prances, who died January 3rd, 18S0, aged 46 years. An actress. Guileless of wrong with ill intent, she was all unselfish; Bhe lived and died beloved by all who knew her. She never lost a friend or made an enemy; she had no fear of death, believing in the great hereafter. Better sol As the curtain descended on the farcical play below, she was enrolled in the joyous company |who realise eternal life above." Pending the proceedings for the recovery of Pharaoh's chariots in the lied sea, another Egyptian speculation has been set on foot for picking up the remains of the French vessels sunk at the battle of the Nile, which besides the Orient, which blew up, were five in number. Aboukir Bay, it seems, is favourable for such operations, and portions of two of the wrecks have been visible until quite lately ; pieces of them continally come on shore, and flin f pistols encrusted with barnacles are always to be bought of fishermen in the locality. What the Company hope to get is the copper, eighty tons of which, it is supposed, will be obtained from each ship. The French Government have waived their rights to it, but the Khedive, as might be expected, wants tbirty-five per cent, of the salvage. About a week ago an lowa man died. He was very wealthy, and left three Bon3, his only heirs, and would you believe it, the ungrateful boys got together and ran away with all the property before the lawyers could get at it, and divided it with each other. There is so much sordid, mean, grasping se'fis'iness in this world that sometimes it is enough to discourage a good lawyer. Two sisters, on a visit to a large bouse near Wanganui, were seeping in a room together upstairs. .During the night (says a correspondent of the Marton papery one of them had toothache, and descended to the kitchen en deshabille to procure something to alleviate the pain. She returned to the bedroom, and exclaiming, " Ob, its so cold," jumped into bed. The exclamation aroused the occupant, who proved to be, not her sister, but a male sleeper. She had got into the wrong room. He turned over, and thinking a burglar was in tho room, caught hold of her. She managed to escape, but not before bis rough handling had scratched her face. She related the circumstance to her sister, and to hide from the gentleman which of the two bad been his unwilling guest, both ladies appeared with a strip of ■ Peking plaster on their cheeka. Moscow society, says the London Daily Telegraph, would appear to be just now considerably exercised by the suicide of one of its brightest ornaments, the young and lovely Coutess Vera Koshelef , who a short time ago suddenly disappeared from her palace, in the old Bussian capital, only two days after her solemn betrothal to Count Heimann, which had been celebrated with festive rejoicing upon an unusually magnificent scale. No one could imagine whither she had gone until her steward received a letter fromjher, written at her chateau in the Crimea, wherein she informed him that " she was going to bathe in the river running through her estate, and should not return alive from her bath." She also described the exact spot near which her body would be found in the water. Search was of course made with all possible promptitude ; aud it resulted in the discovery of the beautiful countess's corpse sewn up in a large straw sack and Bunk in the river. The seams were found to be in the interior of the sack, proving that Vera Koschelefl: had deliberately sewn herself up in the sack on the river bank and then cast herself into the stream. In another letter, addressed to one of her uncles, and received by him some time after her death, she gave as her reason for enclosing herself in a sack previously to drowning herself, her extreme fear of crawfish and water-beetles. Few stranger and more fantastic suicides have been recorded even in Bussian annals of self-destruction, which are exceptionally rich in grisly stories of this particular description. Becording the visit of a party of . gentlemen from Biverton and Invercargill to the Longwood reefs on Tuesday, the Southland Times says:—" The party were permitted to enter the mine and take out a dish of " stuff," which, on being washed, yielded, on a rough guess, at least two ounces of gold. All the members of the party were well acquainted with gold digging, but none of them could say they had ever seen anything equal in richness to the trial dish they had just manipulated. The Geelong Company, adjoining Mr Printz's, are also pushing on work. They have sunk about 112 ft, and are now driviag in towards the reef, which they expect to strike after going some five feet further. They have met with a considerable amount of water, but not more than can be kept in check by an ordinary bucket." Many of the principal farmers in the Timaru district are making arrangements to ship their wheat Home direct on their own this year. A curious weed is to be found at Kopua, and so far as the Napier Telegraph can learn, it is growing nowhere else in that provincial district. It is said to be of the family of St. John's wort. It first made its appearance at Kopua, about two years ago, one or two plants having sprung up by the side of the railway line and attracted the notice of the curious. It has now spread right and left, and smothered all other vegetation. No live stock will eat it ; it has a hard wiry stalk, and bears a bright yellow flower. It will be a very ugly nuisance to the sheep farmer if it gets any hold on a run. M. Bischoffßheim, the Paris banker, is going to endow France with an observatory of the finest possible description. It is to: be situated near Nice, and will cost 1,500,000 f. The Bishop of Natal, in a letter dated Sept, 20, says :— * You may take it as certain that the Zulu war \m not post less thin J

eight millions, instead of f our-and-a half , as estimated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In an article on the unsatisf actory condition of the existing bankruptcy laws of the colony, th« Thames Advertiter says : — ** A man with the cettainty of receiving property in a few months, and pressed for payment of just debts, if not actuated by honest principle, is tempted sorely by the ease with which the White-washing process can now be accomplished to file bis schedule and begin again with a cleaf sheet" The Advertiser also thinks that "something may he said in favor of Col. Whitmore's proposal, to do away with the bankruptcy Jaws altogether, and which, if we understand it aright, would throw the entire onus of the risk of giving fcredit on the giver, and letting Government punish only in case of proved fraud.'' The Garden notices that Australian apples packed in oat nuskiit now reach the London market in good condition 1 . The flavor smacks a little of the packing material, but the flesh is perfect. In the Indian ports and at Singapore the best samples of Australian apples are eagerly bought at prices ranging from 4a to 6s per dozen. That this should be s6 in lands where the moat delicious of tropical fruits ate abundant is all the more remarkable, and chows that a good apple is a fruit universally appreciated by Europeans all over the world. The Waimate (South) correspondent of the Timaru Herald says the following remarkable phenomenon was seen recently at Elephant Hill, about fourteen miles from Waimate. On the top of a range of hills close to Mr J. 25. Parker's homestead, several shearers saw a fierce whirlwind lift the water from a lagoon, in the form of a rery dense vapor, to a height of several hundred feet into the air, where it was received by an enormous bank of clouds for a few seconds, and then dropped back in a confused and irregular mass till it almost hid the top of the range, to be caught up again in a whirling spiral column. These movement* were continued for about ten minutes, and on their cessation a brilliant stream of lightning fell perpendicularly from the clouds into the flats At the base of the hills, apparently in dangerous proximity to a shepherd who wa« proceeding towards tho station with a flock of sheep. A series of heary rainfalls followed these strange phenomena.