A Fternoon Tea Gossip

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 191, 27 February 1904, Page 10

A Fternoon Tea Gossip

By Little Miss Muffitt.

A LADY friend of mine has just captured a "good general," but the gravelled path to the house has been much cut up by the backing of the dray that brought Melinda Harriet s piano. # * Justice Boucaut, who is letinng fiom the South Australian bench at the age of 73, is a gieat leader He devours ever- 'penny dreadful" he can get. He says it is the best mental rest he can § et - It isn't tiue that Tom Mann has thrown up labour, and taken to it on the land. He is still going on organising for the Melbourne Trades Hall. 1 note that Mrs. Tom is being photographed a good deal over there. * * * Wellington stuc*v out its chest, and asserted that it wasn't going to let Dunedin's tram service get to work before our system was running. btill, Dunedin ran city and suburban cars on the 15th of this month for the fiist time. * Australians frequently many young. Latest evidence of the assertion is that a girl of fourteen has just married a youth of seventeen. If the youth is or the average undecided, quickly-tinng Australian variety, he will co out and look for a job after a fortnight s matrimony, and will clean forget where his home is. , A man, who found that a prohibition order meant "no license^' as far as he was concerned told the Court the other day he would leave the colony, so there ! I imagine that Court down on its hands and knees, beseeching him to change his mind. Some neople rather over-estimate their desirability as residents of this country. » ♦ * Latest Yankee dollar-raising scheme is to make people taller. It isn t done bv Wilson Barrett heels or anything like that. You aie sti etched at several dollars per stretch. If you don t pull apart, you return to society anything un to a yard longer than formerly I believe if I were to write much about Yanks I'd learn to tell fibs. * * * A newly-passed Wellington lawyer has a smart office boy. Given two letters to post last Friday he noticed that the one that should have a i^d stamp attached had Id. the Id one bein* stamped with the former value. Asked how he cooed with the difficulty, the boy said he had just changed the addresses on the envelop' I hear one contains a demand for an overdue debt, and the other a cheque to a beneficiary under a deceased client's will. * * * A stubborn man wasted twenty minutes for about twenty-five people the other day. He was overcrowding a Corporation 'bus against lules. Nothing would make him dismount. Curiously lots of Wellington people think that if there is somebody's foot, a bit or board, or a railing to stand on they have a perfect right to become a passenger. The brutal lush of the young and robust to "get there" before the aged and infirm is particularly characteristic of the Empire City * + * There were six men in a railwa" carriage coming from the Hutt the other day. All of them, I gathered, knew the exact amount of ' break" every Australian or English bowler could put on a ball. They spoke with easy familiarity about each member of either team. They even talked football, although the sun was frizzling the paint inside the carriage They were typical sports. "Do any of fellows play cricket or football?" asked a brawny, farmer-look-ing man in the corner. They were silent. They were average "sports. *' * * The law still brays and wears a black cross where Balaam stuck it. A t'otherside lady, who was subncenaed as a witness the other da- didn't turn up. She was fined £2. It transpired that the lady was unable to attend on account of the arrival of a new little Australian of whom she was the mother. The asinine authorities thereupon reduced the fine to £1. Impudent little beggar to get born when mother was ejected to appear before the idiotic Solomons who seem to get sillier throughout the Empire every minute.

Some awful swells ga\ c a clmnoi to Lord Wimbourne the other day ; lleie were no speeches. You coulcln t tiy that game on King Dick 'Women are such a wony, I woudo why God made them. Men get on much better alone. They are useful, of couise, to people who want to be bom.— Mis v.. X Chffoid, m "Meie Stones. * * * Queensland's Mimstei of Education (Mr Barlow) once 'testified and scrambled for threepennies in the ring of the Salvation Army. In his piesent exalted position he still has an odd sixpence foi "blood and fire." * •* * The long, lingering, favourite kiss costs money sometimes. One cost a man I read about the other day £do He had such a hearty appetite that he dislocated the girl's neck. Hence the suit for damages. In future he will take his kisses calmly. * * * Mi J. H. Abbott, who wrote the best Austiahan war book "Tommy Cornstalk," is away to London He s going to agitate a nib for the Daily TeWiaph." He is the so iof the late New South Wales Speaker, and used to write for Sydney "News." * *■ * The South Wellington Choral Society is a humorous body. The beerless southern suburb, known to fame as "the Holy City," will revel shortly in the cantata of that name By the w ay, all the inhabitants of Newtown carry handbags now. I wonder why? * * * Dow le doesn't go in for the scrip and staff business. He takes thought for the morrow— what he shall eat, and what he shall drink, and the wheiewitiial he shall be c'othed. Furthermore, the jays feed him, and not the iavens His lest is not a stone, and he has never been seen in. a suit of skins. He doesn't camp in the lee of a rock for he has been staying at the Hotel Australia. * * * I expect to hear every day that the blacks in the Northern Terntory (South Australia) have been "disperse d'>_that is, slaughtered. Prospectors have lately found immense goldbearing reefs there, but the abon<nnes have driven them back This is an excuse.- Many people aie under the impression that the blacks are nearly wined out already. There are still a good many in Queensland, South Australia, and Westralia. * * * The opemnor line of the British Poet Laureate's New Year ode reads — Years moving oiward, onward , Whence and Whither and Why ? The lest of the poem, evidently written under iced head-cloths is equally briLliant. The idea of asking why a year is movm^ onward instead of standing still is beautifully poetic. Why Mr. Austin was ever made poet laureate is a mystery. He hasn't begun to feel any poetry foicing him to express it. It is hammered out with much bram-sweat. * * « Papers are suspended in Japan by the censor if they are too venturesome. Herewith a censor's order of suspension literally translated . — "Deign honourably to cease honourably publishing august paper. Honourable editor, honourable nubhsher, honourable chief printer, deign honourably to enter august gaol " If the honourable trio aboveenumerated don't at once honourably rush to get seats in the august lock-up, distinguished Jap policemen are unfortunately compelled to submit to the painful necessity of politely directing their honourable tnlb es. * * • And after all, the earth's greatest wits, In fact, her only true ones, Are those who take the old, old jokes And make them look like new ones. * * * wonderful the frequency of the strong-man p ctuie adveitisement everywhere at present. Curious thing to me is nobody ever recommends anybody's physical culture to do work with. Brawn and smew and all that kind or thing is doubtless a very fine thing to have in stock, but none of the advertisements showing rather indecent pictures of bulgy men ever recommend anybody to hitch their mu=cle on to anythinor that matters. Nobody ever did any good by raising masses of ironmongery above their head. If Sandow lives to be a hundred years old, and has twenty-five muscular children, I'll admit that the muscle fetish is worthy of worship.