Afternoon Tea Gossip

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 208, 25 June 1904, Page 10

Afternoon Tea Gossip

By Little Miss Muffitt.

THAT alert and bashful lawyer, Mr. A. R. Atkinson, the champion, prohibitionast, thinks that he can find a psalm that applies excellently to the liquor trade. It reads: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted that I might ieam thy statutes." • # • Dr. W. G. Grace, the great cricketer, is breaking up. He has taken to bowls. I fear I shall be slain by our "Wrong Bias." • • * Mentioned! in the Auckland "Star" tihat the duty on a single invalid's chair, imported into that caty, was £30 The State should certainly prohibit invalids. • • • Bitter-sweet. A giil up North was prizing toffeei from a dish with a knife, the knife slipped, and seveied an artery. Didn't eat any toffee. Moral Don't cut toffee yourself. Get your big brother to do it. • • • Up to the time Inclement Wragge appeared in New Zealand, the weather had been phenomenally fine. Mr. Wragge has visited no town, in New Zealand' during fine weather. How he gained his facetious appellation is obvious. • # • Mary had a little hen That caused her many a tear , It used to lay when eggs were cheap, And stop when the^ were dear. • » ♦ I am informed by an electrical friend that if you stood on the seat on top of one of the new electric cars, and grasped the trolly-wire, you would not be electrocuted as has been reported. The oar being insulated, the circuit wouldn't be complete. He tells me, however, it is possible to get slight shocks whale seated in the cars on wet days. • • • A man called in to a Wellington news agent's- shop the other morning, to stop his "Sydney Morning Herald." He said if the news vendor couldn't deliver it on the day it was published, he would go elsewhere. The news agent tells me he offered to have a pneumatic tube laid across the Tasman Sea in order to keep that penny ai day in the family, but the irate customer bounced ofut of the shop. • # * Taiihape navvies are not all "terrors," who spend their spare time in increasing the beer revenue. One man put in his spare time buildin" a house entirely out of the discarded staves of cement barrels, and he amd the missus and the kids live in it. A propos of this, I remember seeing on one of my travels a good-sized hut, built entirely of kerosene tins, which had been filled with earth to give them weight. • • « Nelson wants a new police station badly. The present one is on a corner, and it has a lamp over it, and other things. Therefore, when a man sauntered in, the other day, and asked 1 a plain-clothes policeman for a pint o' beer, the police believed he was 1 "pulling their leg." He was in deadly earnest, however. The police remarked that they could show him to the "bar," but he declined that kind of refreshment. • * » I noticed a studious-looking girl, the other day, in a Hutt train, deeply immersed in a morocco-bound volume. A mere glance proved it to be lettered "Holy Bible." Turning to greet a friend, who got in at Ngahauranga, the volume slipped out of its cover. An obliging young man hastened to return "Tom Jones" to the fair fraud. Her blush was -a thing to be remembeied. We saw nothing of the morocco cover or its contents thereafter. • • • While King Dick was hovering about outside Whangarei, a towninan rushed up to a portly stranger, and shook him wildly by the hand. "So you're the great Dick Seddon, are you ? You don't feel like a bit of a refresher, do you? My word, but I'm, glad to see you!" And the rotund personage had to admit that he was very small potatoes indeed. He was merely Mir. J. J. Oraig, the universal, black-whiskered provider, of Auckland. The chagrin of the man who made the mistake was absolutely pitiful.

The most absent-minded man in Wellington turned up the other morning at a local merchant's office. He had omitted to remove the curkng-pms from his moustache. His friends tell me he is getting "chy-akked," whatever that may be. • • * As you know, tiuancy from Wellington school* is' veiy rife. What's the matter with following the example ol the Argentine authorities? The said authorities publish in the newspapers the names oi all defaulters, whose' parents aae thus shamed into compliance w ith the authorities' wisihes. Illuminating par. from the oablegiams of a far-North paper. "The whole body of steamers then swept up the hill, expelling the Russians- fiom the heights/ Evidently, the Japs know more than we do about naval warfare on land. I guess, however, the cable-interpreter meant "stanners." • • * I know a girl who is of opinion that she would be a gieat success .ns a strong woman. She has, for many months past, raced to catch the 'bus that connects with the horse-cars, and has always "got there." She is in such good training she can raise half-a-hun-dn-edweight above her head. The girls who are left behind can't even raise a laugh. . # . If competition is the life of trade, the property business m Wellington is pretty lively. I noticed one poor, pathetic little property, with an all-gone look about it, the other day, that was plastered over with the "For Sale" posters of seven separate firms. I suppose there is a pretty considerable rush among the said firms to plant a paste-brush on the unoffending window. • • • Away back in 1902, when the Kaffirs were "cheerfully handing in thenarms," I remarked that it was a mattei of not the slightest consequence, as the modern ai ms were being buried. A late cablegram, in commenting on the spirit of umest among the niggers of Africa, now says that the blacks never at amy time handed in their modea-n arms. The next war in Africa will knock the Boer business "into a cocked hat." • • « Mrs. Margaret Pierce, an American woman, is "dead agin" mixed bathing. "A friend 1 took me down to see the bathing near Bridgeport," she writes. "When I saw men and) women tumbling about in the water, without a sense of decency, I had an indescribable shock. The English do not bathe in that way." I expect that Mrs. Pierce does not swim. Also, that she is as easily shocked as our City Councillors (barring Mr. Izard, of course).