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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XV, Issue 210, 27 October 1880, Page 2

i Mr James Clarendon Ramsbottotn I6her . wood, of Wellit.gton, described as a "gentlei man," (aaja the lost) met a few of his creditors this tndrning at the cftLea of Messrs ; Baker Bros., Star Chambers, for the purpose i of obtaining their consent to bis discharge. i The proceedings proved to be of a rather uu- > usual and decidedly interesting nature. Mr i J. C. B , &c, was interrogated by the trustee

(Mr Baker) with regard to certain instalments of £20 received monthly from his friends at Home. The trustee wbb anxious to learn how it was that the debtor fai'ed to pay auy dividend. The very suggestion appeared to be repugnant to the debtor's feelings', fie had other engagements to meet, he Baid, and be was unable to pay anything to hia creditors. He complained that there seemed to be a ' good deal of ill feeling against him. Ho could not understand why there should be ' any opposition to his discharge, and he ' wanted to know the reason thereof. He had 1 been bandied about from one person to the other till he was heartily sick of the whole i matter. First he bad interviewed his lawyer ; concerning his discharge, and the lawyer had i referred him to the trustee. Approaching '• the subject io the presence of the trustee, that geutleman had referred him back to his lawyer. He was tired Of it. Some " chaff " was here indulged in at the expense of the debtor, wbo protested that he did not come there to be insulted, and if the creditors did not cease their impudence he would go home again. Ultimately it was arranged that the meeting should stand adjourned for a fortnight and Mr taherwood depaited apparently in anything but a pleasant or composed state of mind, remarking as he took up his hat, tbat he would go_ home and stay in bed till the fortnight had expired. In an article finding fault with the Government for reducing the number of mails be- . tween Wellington and Foxton the Post pro- . fesses to have made a discovery. It says:~ "The tru*h is, our members for the Wellington Provincial District have always been a great deal too modest In pressing the just claims of the district, and the consequence has been that the more clamorous demands of other places have been satisfied at our expense." "Public sins and Parliamentary neglect " is the title of a sermon recently" preached by the Rev. W. J. Williams, in Wesley Church, Taranaki street, and copies of which have since bten. printed for circulation. One of these we (New (Zealand Timbs) have received from the publisher 1 , - JMr John Watt, of Willis- street. The motive of ,the Bermon is conveyed in its text — " Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin ia a reproach to any people "—and the reverend sermoniser. pleads, and eloquently, that legislative reforms should sweep away the many elements of moral taint tinder which the body politic BUffWs, and that parliament neglects its duty in not educating the public conscience so as to make i'self moro powerfully felt for good in legislation, commerce, J and all the,departmenta of civil and social life. The reverend ee.ntiemaU declares there are <k glaring evils abroad winch the Press refuse 9 to denounce, and unless Borne stronger j and higher leverage is obtainable than that which is afforded- by the public Press, then the prospect of any marked improvement for the future of this colony is gloomy and depressing in the extreme!" This higb«r leverage, h?. believes, will be found in the pulpit, and we cordially agree with him that if pulpit utterances can be lifted from the ruck of mete conventional precept into the region of practical every-day Christianity, a world of good will be created. The home papers are full of disheartening reports of the harvest in Silesia, Posen, and East Hnd West Prussia. The crops in certain districts of these provinces may be said to be wholly destroyed. Many lives have been lost; railway and river embankments have been swept away t bridges are broken down; villages are flooded; farms we inundatsd, and vast tracts of grain- growing land have been converted into lakes and swamps by torrents of rain. A great famine is feared iv all the above-named provinces. A corres pondent who has penetrated most parts of Silesia estimates tbat in one potato district alone the damage done amounts to 150,000 marks, while 200,000 acre 9 of arable land and pasture ground were inundated by the overflow of the Oder. In the neighborhood of Oppelu 3000 acres of potato fields are covered with water, while clumps of villages are isolated. In Posen an immense expanse of meadow is inundated. Not only is grain destroyed, but straw also. It is feared that in some places the wetness of the ground may disastrously delay or altogether prevent its preparation for next year's seed. In the district of Kulm, West Prussia, 24 • ours' rain completely ruined the harvest, especially the wheat. In some parts of East aud West PriiSßU the fi'.ldsare so impassable lhat it is almost impossible to garner what remains of the grain; and potatoes are beginning to rot. Rye is almost wholly destroyed. Wheat and barley have little surviving value in the market. For the laboring portion of ] the community the potato crop is the moat s-riouß, aud the aid of the Government is already being earnestly invoked. The Weßtland correspondent of the Lytttlton Time* thus comments on a somewhat strange procedure in the Resident Magistrate's Court at Hokitika during the hearing of the charge against the man Hutchison for the alleged murder of hia wife and child "at Kanieri :— After all the witnesses had been examined, a most extraordinary, and, I am informed, unprecedented scene took place. Mr. Giles, the Resident Magistrate, who had been presiding during the whole of the inquiry, and bad taken down the evidence, stepped down from the Bench, went into the witness box, was sworn, and gave his evidence against the prisoner. He then went back to the Bench, listened to the remarks of Mr. Putkias, the prisoner's counsel, retired with tho other Justices to consider their decision, and returning to the Court, committed the prisoner to take his trial on a charge of murder. The evidence given by Mr. Giles was partly of a formal character, putting in and proving the depositions sworn before him aB Coroner; and partly as a member of the College of Surgeons, with refer ence to the condition of the bodies On being sworn, he deposed: — • lam a Coroner of the colony, and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, of London." This most 1 unusual proceeding has, as may be imagined, . excited very much remark, and the more so as the depositions could easily have been proved by some one else. Whether it will vitiate all the proceedings, of course only high legal authorities can decide. It is to be hoped, in the interests of justice, that it may be brought under the notice of the Attorney General, bo that further proceedings may be taken, if the commital is void, or illegal. The Wairarapa correfipondent of the N.Z. Times writes :— " Woman, lovely woman," is again to the fore in the field of enterprise, and this time has taken the initiatory step in what may hereafter prove an extensive industry, which may, moreover, prove more luciative to the dwellers in large towns than to country settlers, with whom the raw material is not bo abundant. The trade is a branch of the rabbit skin business, and the projector is an elderly female, who dispoßed of » parcel of skins to a storekeeper the other day. On looking over the bundle the man of business discovered a number of them to be beautifully marked — tortoiseshell, tabby, and a variety of patterns, which are mostly found «iuot>g members of the feline race. It ii possible the lady will hereafter be looked upon &b a benefactress to the human race for instituting n scheme which will transform an unmitigated nuisance into a Bource of profit. In conjasction with an enterprising small goods butcher tho whole of the animal might be utilised, and a competency easily secured, even in these trying times. A melancholy death from the use of chloroform during a dental operation hapi ened in Liverpool on 27th August. Mre Edwin Lovpnton, of Huyton, bad previously undergone two Bimitar operations, and she went to a Burgeon-dentist's in Mount Pleasant to submit to a third. A lady friend and a medical gentleman accompanied her. Chloroform was ndminiatered to her, but immediately afterwards she gave a convulsive jump out of the chair and died. The critics in England, it appears, ds not like cither Trickett's or Laycock's style. A man ia England was once expatiating on his horse's" style" to John Day, tho celebrated trainer. Day cut him short with " blank bis style, can he go ?" There is no doubt that Trickett has a style of his own, and. it is equally .undoubted that Harry Kelly, who ia perhaps the best judge of pace and style in the Old Couatry, is of opinion ;that there is no man in England fit to hold a candle to him as far as speed is concerned. The firfit tiniei trial rowed by ' Trickett on his former vißit •was so fast that Kelly thought that he must • have "made some mistake about the time, and ' ;waa only convinced of its correctness when i Trickett repeated the performance.

The Bay of Plenty Times says :— Mr. J, Mcßae, of Wairoa, informs us that while some natives were fishing a few days ago in Lake Tarawera with nets for kouras, they catight a quantity of strange fish, supposed to he the white fish placed in the lake, last January. The fish were from three to four inches long, and unlike any the natives had previously caught. The fish being too small for eating, the natives returned them to the water. Mr. Mcßae feels confident that the introduction of the ova to Tarawera has proved a complete success. A man narued Bande, in the employ of a baker at St. Denis, was recently sentenced to death for a diabolical offence. His master having refused to give him the u*ual Christmas box, on account of hia pilfering practices, Baude resolved on vengeance, and forthwith proceeded to obtain at different times and under false pretences a quantity of arsenic. When he hod procured enough be put it in the kneading trough one night as the bread was beiug iliado, The next day nbout a hundred persons, customers of the baker, were taken ill. Fortunately the poison was only fatal in one case, and that happened to be the |iet poodle of an elderly lady. The doctors, however, said that there was enough arsenic to poison three hundred jiepple. We Clip the following wilh regard to Mr Proctor, the celebrated lecturer, with a visit from whom we are to be favored in Nelson, from the Christcburch P/ess :— Mr Proctor i 8 said to be eojoying bis antipodean tour immensely, as may be imagined from the following sketch of him by a genial Victomu journalist:—" Saturday laßt I had a pleasant chat with our latest cometary savant, R. A. Prootor. To my surprise and delight I found him to be of the most jolly, cheery, straightforward, honest-minded style of Englishman, vivacious and full of animal spirits, replete with humor, an admirable rencunteur, quick at rgpdrtee, and filled mainly wilh two desires— the oue to pall a stroke-oar, or, at the worst, one on the stroke side of one of our racing crews (for old Cambridge experience has made him most effective when pulling aniobg the evens), and the second to have a real good game at chess." But although Mr Proctor thoroughly enjoys life, he ia a great worker. As for his mental capital, apart from the hardest sort of study, he has been an omnivorous reader. For three years after he left the University his studies were almost wholly historical and literary, and an article on " Double Stars," in the " Cornhill Magazine" in 18G3, first introduced him to the public as an astronomer. His varied and fextensive and exact information, and the facility with which he uses the pen are matters of marvel. The climate of New Zealand he finds specially favorable for literary work. Between his arrival in Dunedin on a Friday evening and his first lecture on the following Tuesday, he wrote for the " Victorian Review" an article on "The Connection between. Astronomy and the Jewish Sacrifices," and for the " Gentleman's Magazine," " A Popular Discussion of the Fifteenth Puzzle," showing how erery possiblo combination may be treated. Coolies in Peru—Lima (according to a Home paper) i 9 the meeting-point of mam racea. As M. Wiener, in the transcendental language of science informs us, the Church on her holidays gathers there, aa nowhere else, " the descendants of Shem, Ham, and .Taphet, whom the Bible knows, and the Mongol, the Tartar, the Indian, whom it doeß not know." But the Chinaman is the future master Coolie, or freeman, already he is everywhere, in domestic service, in all branches of trade, even in medical practice. The nepiro slaves were enfranchised in 1854, and Chinese coolies were substituted. They are elaveß without the name They have no wives,- for the Celestial Go verntnent does not permit women to be exported. They sign au illusory agreement by which they place themselves at the absolute disposal of a master for the term of eight years. It was the interest of the slaveowner to prolong tho life of his slaves. The master of the coolie thinks only of obtaining from bis servant eight ytars of hard labor, and it is a horrible fact that many of the poor creatureß are worked to death before they reach the term of their brief engagement. But the revenge may come at any moment in a dreadful strvile war. Fifty or sixty thousand men, packed together like cattle in large enclosures, kept in order with whip and revolver, rendered desperate by vicious living, and burning with revenge may explode like a powder magazine, in au inatant.