Afternoon Tea Gossip

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 138, 21 February 1903, Page 6

Afternoon Tea Gossip

By Little Miss Muffitt.

Hard luck follows some people with wolhsli persistence. Fifteen years ago, Mr. J. McCabe, of Ramaxama, lost an eve by a splinter from a log he "was chopping A week ago he lost the other by a precisely similar accident. * * * Arbitration Court proceedings are no joke as a rule, but an examining employer asked a witness, in Auckland recently, if "lourneymen should embrace journeywomen." I hear that the look thrown from the Bench at the joker would have frozen Waimangu. r- * * The number thirteen is unlucky. I hope so, anyhow. The Gore gentleman, w hoi sent a note to> a shop-keeper necessitating her leaving the till unattended 1 , scooped in a dishonest £13 the other day. Hopes are entertained that by its means the poor fellow will be able to get employment — stone-breaking ortreeplanting, for preference. * *■ * I was pushing a tired bike up Kilbirnie hill on' Thursday evening, in the fashionable way, and a rushing wind took a cloud of sparks, stones, dust, and things past me. There was a hard, de-termined-looking countenance looking out of the wind. "Plugger" Bill Martin was making a twenty-mile pace over the hill that nineteen people out of twenty laboriously perspire over at a pace of a mile an hour. * * * I learn from a South African corre-s-pondent that Mr. A. L. La Boote Bartrop, son of Major Bartrop, one time a Victorian S.M., and who went to the war as a private in the First Contingent has won a commission in the South African Constabulary. Mr. Bartrop was a New Zealand civil engineer before he took up tihe carbine, and was transferred during his service to the Intelligence Department. * * * Another totally different type of colonial to win a commission in the same highly-paid corps is Mr. George Smythe, better known to his comrades of the ' First" as "Buffalo Bill," premier cornman deerer of that little band. "Buffalo" was a horsebreaker before he took to blood, and on being transferred to the Army Service Corps, became, in the words of his new CO., a perfect marvel at organisation and discipline. Hence Ins exaltation to his present excellent position. * * * Did you ever see the black bread M. Krakoft, our distinguished Russian visitor, wishes us to eat? He says it is 1 strong. So it is. I've had a chunk of it for many years now and it gets no weaker. It is made of rye, generally, and a hunk of it is usually flavoured by a w ipe from an onion — the family onion — used in succession. But, it is strong — strong as the "pain noir" of the French peasant, or the "zxr&rt boereu brod" of the wily Afrikander. As M. Krakoff says we give the best of our grain product to the pigs — and the Boers * * * Gieymouth gathered fifty-four Chmamen under the sheltering wing of its watchhouse the other day. They had been playing fan-tan, and the police, whe play nothing but ping-pong for pennies, surrounded the Celestials and leaped a yellow harvest. It is understood that the police have deeidedtoput down the practice, not altogether on account of its sinfulness, but mam'y because fines keep the Chows poor, and economically prohibit them from clearly out with money which the white man refuses to earn by the means employed by the slant-eyed sinners. * # * Young Bedford, the record polling M.H R., of Dunedin, is just at present being run off his legs by bushels of letters asking him to lecture here, there, and everywhere. The dreamy, darkeyed youth dashes into politics like an armoured war horse, dives deep down into democracy, fills pulpits of churches anywhere he is asked, and always eets a big crowd to gather up his pearls. His invariable custom is to speak about a daily newspainerfull on the subject in hand and to then fill the Saturday's supplement with unattached eloquence. He is going to stir up something or other in June next.

Nelson papers oomplam that red-faced youths of the common, or garden variety of Wellington larrikin®, who do the cheap trip across the Straits get affected by the "smell of the local brewery," and make themselves a nuisance* in IN elson by "guying" the passers-by. • • * Maioi" Taylor, as a Sabbatarian and an abstainer from Sunday biking "Thirty thousand dollars in the lump is a mighty good thing to have right here and now," he says, "but I'm riding for a higher stake, an' I guess a clean soul on the great day will be a more valuable possession than all the dollars in the United States of Amerioa." So ' Mr. Dooley," I see, has been and got married. The 1 announcement leads ' The marriage of Mr. Peter F Dunne, the well-known humorous writer, popularly known as "Mr. Dooley," to Miss Margaret Abbott, of Boston, took place at New York last month. Mr. Dunne received messages of congratulation from Mr. Anthony Hope, Sir A. Conan Doyle, Mr. Justin McCarthy, Sir Henry Irving and many other celebrities." ¥■ * * All constables are not linguists apparently. A zealous bluebottle arrested a Manawatu Maori lady the other day for "language." Could the constable speak Maori ? His Worship asked. The conr stable could not. The lady repeated the "sw T ears" m court. An interpreter said that if the language wasn't cursory it was perjury, for the lady had been calling the handcuff er, "O, the sun that shone in the dark sky," "Kaipai the blue-robed pakeha god " and all the rest of it. The constable blushed. Case dismissed. # * * An Oam aru boy, in South Africa, writes to his friends that Durban business people would "rather employ a Kaffir than a colonial." This is quite as true as the statement I now make that there was a fall of snow twelve feet deep in Wellington yesterday. There are hundreds of thousands of pounds being paid to colonials per annum in wages in Africa and. whether it is fust or otherwise, the colonial who is a specialist in any line is surer of a iob than the real out-and-out red-necked Britisher from London. Perharjs the or otherwise. Pei-hans the Oa.maxu boy did not get the billet he was aftei . * * * Don't you get that tired feeling w hen you read that millionaires are so* human that they spend thousands of pounds in presents for their children. Carnegie the letter-in-the-slot< hbrarv machine, has set by a series of maoTiificent rooms in his new mansion for little Margaret Carnegie. If that young lady was the daughter of Charlie Chips, the carpenter, nobody would rush into print announcing that Charlie had devoted some tobacco momev to the purchase of a lifesize rag doll for his vounester althoueh. the excuse in chronicling the millionaire's munificence is to show the paternal love lavished on the offspring. ♦ • « There is a good deal of pondering material in that remark of the Premier's that the State will control the liquor traißc someday. I suppose there will be no prohibition vote then ? It w o<uld be obviously sinful for a brainy Government to enact, that a person in Wellington should have a controlled beer, and a person in Newtown should not. It is clearly impossible for the Government to do anything else in common, fairness than to sweep away local option. Local option, as you know, does not* ma,ke a man less thirstv — it drives him further away. and oarch.es him nicely, fattening urj the beer gentleman, who feels glad Ins neighbour in thte next district is sternly ordered to sin no more. The subject is of British Encyclopaedia size. * * * Rev. C. W. Carrington, of C'hustchurch, remarked the other day, from the pulpit, that this was the worst educated generation the world had seen. He says that "too much of our reading consists of a hasty perusal of scraps and tit-bits in odd moments. — sometimes religious tit-bitsi — nothing deep, no d scipline of mmd, nothing well done." I believe Mr. Carrington, of course, but thousands would not. It used to be unfashionable to know anything except to get. the last ounce out of one's dependenits. But, seeing that knowing nothing scholarly was being better educated than the present-day standard, why not revert to the roystering times of say a couple of centuries ago, when blood-lettinfr both surgically and gentlemanly were the highest arts ?